I have to agree with Villain here. I don't see a loss of vertical view, the games are just giving you a wider field of vision.
I recently had my old faithful 21" CRT die and bought a new monitor under pressure and time constraints but it's okay (Ausus VE247h). 16:10's weren't around at a reasonable price. I got a 24" 16:9. The only bummer was that my physical vertical viewing experience went down from 12" to 11.5 inches. Yes, I measured it. It is wider though.
The bigger problem is these damn console games have such a pinched 'ingame' FOV that needs to be adjusted. We have wider monitors now but a narrower 'arc of vision'. In the old days I'm pretty sure Quake 3 or Enemy Territory defaulted at 90 degrees on a 4:3 monitor, now we have 75 degrees as default on a widescreen. I think I'd tweak mine up to around 95d or sometimes 100d but that could be considered cheating and you started getting a 'fishbowl' effect if you went much higher.
I've played FPS's all my life and can sit in front of a computer for 16-34 hours (depending on how much beer I have) but playing Metro on my Dads 120mhz gave me motion sickness, or something, I didn't get sick, just couldn't play for more than an hour (that has nothing to do with how boring and shitty it is).
When I started playing Deus Ex: HR the same thing started happening, then I found the 'in-game' setting that let me set it up to 100 (I tried 90 and still use it there). It made all the difference. I haven't bothered checking it out but it might be interesting to see if a screen shot shows you a different vertical resolution based on your FOV between 75 and 90, or if the interface gets stretched. I believe I read that Dead Space just chopped it and didn't scale properly, not sure about DX3.
At least it made the game playable for me. Not some cramped motion sickness inducing headache machine. I understand the theory behind doing that, is that the old console hardware can't draw as much but since it's assumed that you're on a couch on a big TV a few meters away it wont give you a headache, and of course kids don't know better but on a computer an FOV of 75 is painfull to some people.
Xi said:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824005234
IPS/LED 23 Inch monitor. $239.99
Something like this is just fine.
Aren't you the guy that thinks streaming games over YouTube is okay?
Anyways, I would never buy an 8ms response time monitor, but I sometimes play FPS's. I thought it was a bad recommendation.
It looks like the OP got a good 27" monitor for his money, maybe he'll tell us about it when he plays a few things.
My opinion is that I got a 24" under emergency conditions but think I should have spent a few more bucks and got the 27". A good game gets you absorbed yet it would be nice to just perfectly fill your vision with 'the game'.