It really depends on what sort of monitor you get. I used the Philips 243v7qdab (wish Philips would stop using such strange model numbers) for some time and I bought that for £69 new. And for a 24 inch monitor at 1920x1080 at 75hz, with 3 inputs and speakers, you can't argue with that. That is not expensive for what you get. If you got 2, you could have an incredible value setup. If you've never used 2 like me monitors and sit only around 2 - 3 feet away from a monitor (which is as far back as I and maybe some other users can get), even 27" would be too big.
I can understand that if you go for monitors the size of the smaller end of TVs - 30" and above, that is where they start getting expensive. But monitors generally have much higher refresh rates and the colour accuracy is significantly better. TVs out the box usually look horrible if you plug them into your PC; completely over saturating the content and making the colours pop and stand out. However, many seem to like this for movies and the like so for TV it isn't so much of a problem. Some TVs have an option to turn on a "PC mode" which turns off this feature which in my view makes everything look unnatural, but they still are not as nice as monitors in general I'd say for desktop use. But in terms of colour accuracy, monitors are usually far better (especially if you calibrate them which is far harder or sometimes not possible on a TV) and I think they also look a lot better close up. One thing that does really annoy me though is that all TVs these days seem to be glossy and yet I can't find any new monitors anywhere that have this finish. They used to a few years ago, and 10 or more years ago, you could get more still. then obviously go back to the age of CRT monitors and they would be glass. I find it really helps with the colour depth, sharpness and many other things.
I'm a bit behind in terms of liking large screens. Me and my family thought a 32 inch TV initially seemed too big upgrading from a 24 (23 inch visible) Sony CRT TV, but it didn't take too long and we now have a 40 inch which still probably is smaller than most would have for our room size. I wouldn't want 2 monitors at the moment even if i had the space. I briefly had a 25 inch monitor until it had a fault and actually decided 24 was enough so that is my next plan to upgrade with. Just bump up the resolution.
