Need a new monitor, rec's for a good one suitable for video editing?

[Bruce/Fl]

One of my two monitors died. I had an unused Vizeo 26" HDTV that I hooked up via HDMI thinking it would be awesome, but it is really a poor choice. Contrast sucks, etc. I did some color and brightness correction with it in Vegas last night on some old 8mm film I had scanned, and looking at it today on my regular monitor, my work was worthless, it looked awful. Looked good on the Vizio as I did it, but, yeah.

I'd like to get a setup that is somewhat close to "broadcast" specs, maybe something I could calibrate or have a pro do, if it isn't too much.

My PC is a generic I had built a few years ago before I got heavy into video editing, so video card performance wasn't given the appropriate weight I would give it now. The video card is included in the CPU, if you know what I mean. It shows up as a "AMD Radeon HD 6530D" The processor it is based on is a "AMD A6-3650 APU with Radeon HD Graphics. (Quad core, 2.60 GHz)

Is this something I can work with or should I seriously consider an upgrade? If not and it is adequate, is there a good class of monitor I should look at to get close to broadcast spec?

Any info in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

[redwudz]

The processor it is based on is a "AMD A6-3650 APU with Radeon HD Graphics. (Quad core, 2.60 GHz)

You would get more of a performance improvement by using a faster CPU.

I usually recommend a CPU running closer to 4Ghz. Perhaps this one if your motherboard can support it:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113335&cm_re=AMD_A6_cpus-_-19...-335-_-Product
That should give a large improvement for processing power for a decent price.

You could also add a SSD drive for boot to improve performance a bit. SSDs are probably overkill just for editing.

Also three large hard drives, a TB or so. 4GB RAM for a 32bit system and 8 - 16GB for 64bit system.
I don't worry much about graphics cards as the CPU is more important, a least for re-encoding.

Someone else may be able to answer your monitor question.