Looking for a Great Heart Rate Monitor

I tried a few heart rate monitors - at the same time! First of all, any heart rate monitor with a chest strap is going to be WAY more accurate than one where you have to hold your thumb to a screen or button because the strap keeps a constant "watch" on heart rate as opposed to, say, doing 20 jumping jacks and then testing heart rate, but it's falling... or testing heart rate while running uphill but not the same downhill, etc.
Second - I did actually wear 3 bands at a time while doing my morning routine. They all had accurate heart rates - very close to each other. HOWEVER - the "calories burnt" were all vastly different. I looked at the reports of time versus average heart rate and plugged those numbers into an equation that I got from some fitness sights when I googled, "How many calories did I burn calculation." The calculation involves you age, height, average heart rate, and time spent in an activity and that all "spits out" the calories burnt. I don't remember all the brands of heart monitors I used, so I can't say which ones had terrible calorie read-outs in comparison to the equation I had (I put the equation in excel so that I only needed to change the cells for time and heart rate), but I do know that the most accurate BY FAR was the Ft4 - which I could only find out here at Big 5 (Sports Challet only had Ft7 which is probably just as accurate as the Ft4 - but cost a lot more due to being the fancy and newer monitor). The Ft4 usually told me, for a 60 minute workout, that I burnt 15 to 30 calories less than the equation projected - and I preferred an "under" the actual calories to the over-calories that most other monitors gave me - sometimes as much as 60 calories higher for the same 30 minute workout!
In the end, all chest straps were pretty accurate with heart rate, so if you are good with excel and can program the work-out equation into your computer, then any monitor will do. Hope this helps!
By the by - the monitor tells you how many calories you burnt during a time period - but it's a good idea to subtract your "maintenance calories" for that time since you would have burnt those calories just being alive. I wore for several hours doing various activities to figure out about what my maintenance calories would be while awake and working. For example, average calories for 24 hours is 68 calories just for being alive - but while sleeping I only burn about 50 calories - which means that my day time maintenance calories is about 76 calories for 1 hour, so if I work out for 1 hour and it says that in 1 hr I burned 250 calories, I figure that 76 of those calories I would have burned anyways towards my food intake - so I really only burned about 175 more calories than I normally would have. Make since? Hope so.