can't afford hd monitor
 

I can't afford one. Sorry. I'm shooting with the HD100 and heard some people are getting satisfactory result using DV/HDV rack from serious magic, ie using a laptop.

Can someone suggest a decent laptop for this application? i'd imagine the key is a good, big, lcd screen. Who makes such a beast? I don't know that I'd need a bunch of cpu power or tricked out features. What advice? any success/horror stories?

I don't think the size of the LCD screen would be a factor because unfortunately you're not getting a full rez image using DV Rack - even in SD mode the rez is halved. So for critical focusing, I'm not sure how much use it would be. And of course the colours on a laptop LCD are going to be way off.

I suppose the benefit is the direct to disk recording and the onboard scopes.

DV Rack's monitor is just like a pro one, and has fully adjustable chroma, phase, brightness, and contrast with blue gun and color off.

okay so should your laptop have a mininum resolution? shouldn't it be widescreen?