The SGI flat panel is wonderful, with some caveats..
Written: Nov 01 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: great picture quality, wonderful color, and the sharpest display I've ever seen
Cons: high cost, computing power used by video card, and no hardware DVD support.
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| mathowie's Full Review: Archived Computer Hardware Reviews |
I've been lucky enough to use a 17.3" SGI 1600SW for the last four months. During that time, I've fell in love with the sharp image and big (1600x1200) screen resolution.
I can code all day and my eyes are no longer tired late in the day. The display is so bright and crisp it's like looking at pages in a book. Every other monitor I look at (including my 17" Sony CRT at home) is really blurry (this thought scares me a little when I think back at the 10+ years of daily CRT use I've already done and how my eyesight has been steadily decreasing as I've gotten older). Unlike some other 15" LCD monitors I've tested, the color reproduction on the SGI is beautiful and accurate under WinNT, and also great under Linux. Due to the resolution, I can comfortably run Photoshop, Homesite, a FTP client, a telnet client, a web browser, and an email app all at the same time in different windows, making this monitor the ultimate web development screen.
Of course, like most great things, it definitely has its downside. Price is the biggest drawback. The list is almost $3k, and the cheapest I've ever seen it for sale is $2200 at Buy.com. Given SGI's rocky past and current financial woes, there's also a questionable risk involved when investing in such a piece of hardware. If SGI goes under tomorrow, who will fix my monitor a year from now? The big screen resolution I mentioned earlier (1600x1024, just a 176 pixels short of a full 1600x1200) is roomy enough for multiple windows, but it is almost the same resolution that most 21" monitors run, yet this only has 17.3" of screen area. I found small type a little bit small (although still incredibly sharp) but liveable, while some of my coworkers wonder how I can read 10 and 12 pt type all day. The last drawback is the 32Mb video card included in the package. On my current workstation, a PII 266 w/ 256Mb of RAM under NT workstation, the video card draws considerable processor power. I'd say my system seems a good 5 to 10% slower after I moved to the 32Mb AGP card from a 8Mb PCI Matrox card. Another drawback of the card is the lack of DVD support. I'm currently in the process of upgrading my workstation to a PIII 600-700, yet I cannot order a system with a DVD drive and hardware decoding. Given the monitor's 16:9 (1.85:1) aspect ratio, this would be a killer screen to watch letterboxed movies on (which wouldn't be letterboxed-unless they were 2.35:1), yet SGI chose a video card with no DVD support. I find this a huge oversight on SGI's part.
Overall, it's a pleasure to look at and use, and if you can afford it, get one. I'm sure the upcoming 22" Apple Cinema Display will blow this SGI out of the water, since all shortcomings (besides price) of the SGI seem like they will be eliminated in the new Apple LCD.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mathowie
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Member: Matthew Haughey
Location: San Francisco, CA
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 23 members
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