The Bottom Line: If you’re in the market for an LCD, you should check this out. It’s a phenomenal deal and the output is astounding. Plus, you can get it for $1000 now.
I’ll start off by saying that the SGI 1600SW is the sharpest, brightest, most beautiful display I’ve ever seen. Now, on to the review.
The SGI 1600SW has been on the market for several years now, and the price has been dropping steadily. Debuting at a hefty $2799, I got mine for $995 w/ a Multilink adapter from SGI Direct on eBay. Regardless, that’s the price many 15” flat panels are going for nowadays, so it’s certainly a good deal.
Operating at a resolution of 1600x1024, the SGI 1600SW uses a proprietary LVDS standard to drive the monitor. This means that, if you are a PC user, you basically have two graphics card choices: The Number Nine Revolution IV-FP, or the 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1-1600SW. This was certainly the monitor’s number one downfall until the release of the SGI Multilink adapter. The Multilink adapter allows the display to be driven by any VGA-, DVI-, or DFP-compatible video card. VGA is the current standard employed by CRT monitors – it’s analog, and thus isn’t as crisp as digital connections. DFP was a standard for flatpanels before the advent of DVI, but it is limited to 1280x1024 resolution. DVI incorporates the best of both worlds. It is backward-compatible with DFP monitors, but it can support very high resolutions. It can even carry an analog signal.
Now, back to the display. Colors are vibrant. I mean reeeally vibrant. And the output is incredibly sharp. I won’t bore you with the technical aspects (like I did in the previous paragraph ... sorry!), but suffice it to say that LCD technology is inherently sharper, since each individual pixel of the display is separate from the others, whereas with CRTs the image is projected with 3 electron guns on the surface of the display. Which leads me to another aspect of the display. CRTs often flicker because the phosphors on the surface decay before they’re shot at with the electron guns again. This can be resolved by increasing the refresh rate, but this often is at the cost of sharpness. LCD pixels stay on until they’re told to turn off, so there is no flicker whatsoever, reducing eyestrain.
There are four major complaints with current LCD technology that I’m aware of. One is that the color and contrast degrades severely when you view it at an angle. This display has the best viewing radius I’ve ever seen. Another is that often, moving objects on the screen have a ‘ghosting’ effect as a result of the pixels not switching on and off fast enough, rendering LCDs unsuitable for 3D games. This display doesn’t have this problem to the degree of others – I can comfortably play 3D games on it, though there is some slight ghosting when moving windows. The third complaint is that LCDs have a fixed resolution. As I said before, LCDs have individual pixel elements. A side effect of this is that any resolution other than the one the LCD was designed for, in this case 1600x1024 (or 1280x1024 w/ letterboxes), the screen will be quite blurry and unattractive compared to CRTs. The final complaint is that LCDs often have “dead pixels” – pixels that stay one color, or none at all, regardless of what’s being displayed. LCD manufacturing technology hasn’t been perfected yet (that’s why they’re so expensive). This particular display has 1,638,400 pixels, so I doubt it would be uncommon if two or three of them didn’t work. I was fortunate enough to have a display with no dead pixels, but it could happen to you.
This display is also very lightweight – only 8 pounds, and the stand is easily adjusted vertically, though there is no horizontal adjustment. The cable length is generous – since digital signals don’t degrade nearly as easily as analog signals – at 10 feet (!). And that’s without the Multilink adapter in between. With DVI connection, the monitor can be placed about 16 feet away from the computer.
Of course, to get your money’s worth out of the monitor, you’ll need a graphics card that supports the 1600x1024 resolution. There are three that I’m aware of that have this support: Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI, Matrox G400, and unofficially the ATI Radeon. The Radeon will only allow 1280x1024 resolution in either DVI or VGA mode unless you install the driver version 5.13.3092 available from http://www.reactorcritical.com/files/ATI/R62k-12-21-2000.zip . This will enable the 1600x1024 resolution. I’m running an All-in-Wonder Radeon connected to the display via DVI as you read this.
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