While we love this monitor's picture, color, and the way it just looks so great sitting next to a matching Blue and White G3 tower, we have become a little concerned with it's reliability. We have four of these, all under 6 months old, and we have had to have the logic boards replaced on two of them, resulting in both being in the shop for over a week. They're covered under warranty, but it's still pretty annoying.

I am on a Macintosh users listserv, and I posted my concern. I got varying replies from people, including many people who said they had no problems at all. However, I also got many responses from people who had also had their logic boards fail, and one report of an organization in which 5 of their 50 21" Studio Displays had failed. That's a 10% failure rate! That fact, combined with Apple's shorter than average 1 year warranty, makes this monitor a risky buy.

I still don't have an accurate feel for what percentage of these monitors break: One thing that should be quickly pointed out is that people on the list were probably far more likely to share their problems than to pipe in just to say that nothing had gone wrong with their monitor. People talk about events, not non-events. Who knows, maybe we just have especially dirty power in our building and that's affected the hardware.

As we upgrade to G4s I'd like to learn more about this reliability issue before we shell out the $1400 for the matching graphite monitor. (note, the internals of the Blue and the Graphite monitors are the same)

As far as my rating goes, the jury's still out so I'll give it a 3.

If I learn that the failures are a fluke and we're just unlucky, it gets a solid 5.

-Lewis




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