I have had good luck with Litemax/Navpixel. They are still very expensive compared to commercial monitors, but are 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of the equivalent from Furuno, Hatteland, etc.
The advantage, and why I ultimately spent the $$, is in a number of areas, in no particular order:
- 1000 nit, full daylight visibility. To me this still matters even in a pilot house. When the sun is low and in front of you, moving your sight from outside to the monitors will make the monitors much easier to see with 1000 nits. Otherwise you eyes need to adjust quite a bit. The same is true when there is glare coming in from other angles on the screens. You pay handsomely for the brightness, but I think it's worth every penny in this application.
- Dimming smooth dimming to full black. Most monitors dim just a bit, then go black. That's not helpful for dusk and night operation. Lots of people compensate by making light filtering screens that fit over the monitors. I'd rather have a cleaner solution, and full dim to black does that.
- A dedicated dimmer knob. This is really like as compared to fumbling around in menus and pressing buttons that you can't see or distinguish from one another. You can quickly and easily find the knob by feel.
- Display modes that respect and preserve the incoming video aspect ratio. This only matters with certain devices, but when you need it, you really need it. If, for example, you plan to use the monitor to display a black box radar or many of the black box chart plotters, those devices have fixed video output resolution. 100% of the commercial monitors that I have tried take the incoming video and stretch it to fit the screen in one way or another. The result is a distorted chart or radar image with range rings that are oval rather than round, and perspective and scaling that is all off. It simply doesn't work with commercial monitors.