The 21" with the Refresh Rates
Written: Apr 03 '01
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Pros: awesome refresh rates, great resolution, and face it, it's big
Cons: quality control issues
The Bottom Line: If you're looking for a 21 inch monitor and care about refresh rates, the short-depth Graphic Series GS815 is an excellent choice.
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| Sombrero's Full Review: ViewSonic GS815 21 inch CRT Monitor |
Why I bought It
Background
I'm a CS major with a need for screen real estate. I've run dual-19 inch monitors for over a year, but when my Dell 1226HS tanked and its refurbished warranty replacements didn't fare so well, I decided it was time for a new monitor. I thought it would be a sign of weakness to buy a new 19" monitor when I could still go through warranty hassle and end up with a working one, so I opted to jump up to a 21" monitor for my primary monitor.
My Requirements
I had four main requirements in my 21" monitor:
- Refresh rate. This one is the most important to me. I require a refresh rate of at least 85Hz. 75Hz is dubious, and anything below is just plain painful. Of course, not only do I need 85Hz, but I need it at 1600x1200. The rule-of-thumb I use for monitors is 21" = 1600x1200, 19"=1280x1024, and 17"=1024x768. I was not willing to run at anything less than 1600x1200x85Hz for the money I knew I would shell out.
- A well known brand. I like ViewSonic and think they make pretty good stuff. My other monitor is an E790 (read the review if you like) and I've been very happy with it. Given that ViewSonic tends to be pretty price-competitive and I like them, I went into the purchase basically expecting to end up with a ViewSonic monitor, but I did check the other options too.
- Price. If I didn't care about money I'd get one of those Apple Cinema Display flat panels.
- Fit on my Desk. I was a little bit scared my desk wouldn't fit a 21". It does, and the fact that the GS815 is a short depth monitor helps too.
Features
Refresh Rate (aka Video Bandwidth)
The GS815 has 300MHz of video input bandwidth. If you buy this monitor, this is a good number to rub in your friends' faces, because this is one honkin' big number, and their monitors probably don't even come close. The 300 MHz of video bandwidth supposedly buys you 95Hz at 1600x1200 according to ViewSonic's website. To be honest, I've only run mine as high as 85Hz for a few reasons. First, the combination of Win2k, the GS815 monitor information file supplied by viewsonic, and a GeForce2 MX running Detonator 7.xx reference drivers only lets me select a maximum refresh rate of 85Hz. I don't mind this for a few reasons:
- I really don't notice an enhancement at refresh rates above 85Hz, despite the fact that I'm whiny about anything less.
- I'm lazy and like good video game performance. Fixing it would probably require a lot of driving dancing, and probably require me to downgrade to my video card manufacturer's own drivers which aren't as up to date as the detonator drivers.
- My video card, like most Nvidia-chipset based boards, has a crappy lowpass filter on its output. The result is that the higher the video bandwidth, the more fuzzy looking my display and text. My friends think I'm paranoid, but there are websites out there to back me up.
I mention all of this so you don't get surprised by the fact that your system doesn't jump to 95Hz out of box.
Display Options and User Interface
The GS815 is not your entry-level monitor. It has a *lot* of options for you to play with to help reach display perfection. Generally speaking, all you'll really need to deal with are the horizontal and vertical size and position options, with may a dash of pincushion/trapezoid configuration thrown in. But lucky you, there's also zoom, tilt, covergence, vertical linearity, hooking, (color stuff), purity, and moire settings. I'm sure there's some advantage to all of these options, but I ran into the problem where I don't quite understand the significance of some of the options, and I don't have the patience to figure them out either. The manual is your modern-day skimpy manual, so don't look to it for help.
The user interface is your standard button-1, down, up, button-2 ViewSonic interface. It has been changed a little bit since my E790 rolled off the line though. Specifically, if you push button 2 on the E790, you jump directly into the viewmeter which gives you the specs on the current mode the monitor is in. However, on the GS815 button 2 operates just like button 1. This is good a thing for dealing with the menus, as button 2 acts to select menus and button 1 exits up a level. If you remember to use button 2 to get into the menu, you will be treated to an intuitive experience. If you forget and use button 1, you will be highly confused when you hit it again and the menu closes. (Actually, I'm slightly lying... ViewSonic apparently ran into this a lot and so the second time you hit button 1, it does nothing, hopefully reminding you to use a different button. But if you hit it a third time it's exit's-ville for you.)
Size
For people concerned about desk-space (not me!), you will be happy to know that it is a short-depth monitor. In fact, the GS815 is .6" shorter than my E790 monitor. Keep this in mind if you are concerned about losing desk space to your monitor. 21" monitors can get very large. In fact, be aware that the 22" monitors out there tend to have the same viewable area as a 21" monitor (20"), but that they are just _bigger_.
What I learned from Using It
ViewSonic doesn't have Perfect Quality Control
There are two problems with my 21".
First, it has one bad pixel relatively close to the center of the screen. By bad pixel, I mean that there is one pixel that is about two inches up from the center of the screen that is red when it should be white. Having a bad pixel isn't that uncommon; my Dell 19" the monitor replaced had a bad pixel too. In fact, bad pixels are within spec as long as they are out around the periphery of your monitor. A call to ViewSonic let me know that I shouldn't have a bad pixel there and that I was allowed to return it and get a new one. Unfortunately, when you get a monitor from a website at one of the cheapest prices you can find and a brand that doesn't charge out the wazoo, you run into a problem where you have to pay for return shipping (although they would have paid to ship the new one back to me). Neither of them can really afford to pay for your monitor to be shipped to them, and shipping a heavy 21" monitor isn't all that cheap. I decided that I would suck it up and deal and save the money. The logic was that I was no longer getting a cheap deal if I paid for that (it would begin to approach some of the more expensive merchants, both on the net and local), and that I might end up with an even worse monitor the second time around.
The second problem is a slight mis-convergence in the upper-right of the monitor. It's a pretty minor misconvergence. Sadly, using the convergence controls on the monitor can't fix the problem (at least not without making the rest of the monitor look like crap). It's possible that this one is just caused by the fact that there's a 19" monitor sitting a few inches to its right. The misconvergence is still there when the 19" is off, but arguably it could still be having some kind of effect, and I don't care enough to move the monitor to see.
Both of the flaws are relatively minor. Basically, they're severe enough to make you paranoid when your new, expensive monitor arrives, but nothing significant to worry about. But, you should still keep this in mind. I'm not aware of other manufacturer's quality control track records, but it's possible if you pay more you might get a better probability of a 'perfect' monitor. Or, if you buy locally, you can at least keep taking the monitor back till you get one that's perfect. Note that my own experience with ViewSonic up to this point has been perfect (my E790, a V773 I've inherited, my roommate's GS790, his Q71, and a friend's GS790 all are basically perfect), but it's something to look out for.
Warm-Up times matter at 21"
Monitors take time to warm up, and their properties change slightly. Specifically, you will discover (at least with the GS815) that the settings that provide you with wall-to-wall image when the monitor has been on for a while present you with a little bit of a black frame when the monitor is first turned on. But sure enough, after you wait a while, the picture is 'full screen' again. You might want to think twice about enabling your power saving feature, or at least making sure that it wait a non-trivial amount of time before it turns on.
Conclusion
The ViewSonic short-depth Graphic Series GS815 is an excellent monitor with great refresh rates. I'm extremely happy with it despite its defects. However, I really can't give the monitor 5 stars when it arrives with defects that really shouldn't have been there. Maybe my monitor is just a fluke, but arguably this is something that ViewSonic could fix through better quality control measures or better packing (which was very good I might add!) or something like that.
If you are concerned about refresh rates, the GS815 is a very good choice. If you're concerned about desk space, the GS815 is an even better choice. In fact, even if you don't care about either of these things, the fact that you're thinking about a 21" makes the GS815 a very good choice just because if you're going to pay the ~$650 minimum required for a 21" you might as well shell out a little bit more dough and get a quality one.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 760
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
Sombrero
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Member: Andrew Sutherland
Location: Cambridge, MA
Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 1 member
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