[Pavel]

Hate to say it, but my iMac cost less than your monitor...

The guts of today's computers are mostly good enough for photo editing, if you have enough RAM and there is not much point putting money in them beyond some fairly low sum, if photo editing is the most resource intensive application you do. On other hand, large, high resolution monitor is handy for photo editing like noise reduction, sharpening, contrast and brightness adjustment etc. Normally, you have to zoom in/out all the time, but with 30" you basically see the image the size I print, so that you have a good idea how your noise will look like on the final print without zooming. Occasionally, I missed things on the 24" monitor. They were visible if I looked more carefully, but I did not and I had to reprint. With a bigger monitor, such glitches are much more readily apparent. Admittedly, the cost of reprinting is much lower than the cost differential between 24" and 30" monitor, but my comfort level about "what you see is close to what you get" is increased. I know that 30" monitor is an unnecessary (but useful) luxury.