I've been using my 40" Samsung 40B650 as a monitor for about two years now. I demo'd for months before getting it since I knew I wanted it to be sharp enough to make reading font easy. And it is.
Samsungs have some of the highest contrast ratios around, great for black print on a white background, and this particular model came with an "ultra clear panel" which sounds like a bunch of hooey, but I stood in several different stores for hours and used my own movies from home and this TV was better than even the other Samsungs nearby. It did cost more, but I tried buying a cheaper Panasonic and ended up bringing it back because the font was just too blurry.
I sit about six feet from it and also use it to watch streaming movies and TV from my desktop. It excells at both. My 23" matte-screened Dell monitor (which sits the usual 20" or so from me when I pull it forward) gets very little use any more, mainly when I'm going to do a Photoshop project that will require me to stare really hard at the screen for like six hours and make tiny, delicate movements with my mouse.
The only drawback to using my Samsung is that I get more eyestrain when reading for a long time (say, over an hour) with my Samsung compared to the matte-finished Dell. This is not due to any blurriness but because of the high contrast (this can be much eased by changing the background color on documents to a moderately darker color, or simply highlighting the text on a web page, converting to medium blue background with white font).