If you’re going to be doing any professional-level graphic design, one of the most important things you have to worry about is colour accuracy, which means contrast ratio is probably going to be more important than refresh rate, and you may want to consider looking at a monitor with higher ratings for gamma and accuracy…unfortunately they tend to be very expensive, so in most cases you’ll only really go down that path if you’re a professional.

While LCD is getting better all the time, many graphic designers still swear by old-school CRT displays, because they still have better colour reproduction. But when you get large displays you’ll have this massive lump on your desktop that may be put to better use…and you’ll have to keep an eye on geometric distortion on the screen.