A True 17” Flat Panel Display of Great Quality at Great Price!
Written: Jan 02 '02
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Pros: All the advantages of a great flat panel display at a low price.
Cons: Speakers are only okay. No multiple computer hookup like some other Viewsonics have.
The Bottom Line: If you have been waiting for the right drop in price to get a flat screen, this is the monitor for you!
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| grimjack2's Full Review: ViewSonic VA700 17 inch LCD Monitor |
This is easily the best price to quality performance LCD monitor I have seen yet!
This monitor can now be bought for $700! I saw it on sale for $100 off of the regular price of $800 at my local Office Depot at the end of November. $800 for a 17" viewable LCD ‘flat panel’ seemed pretty good at the time. Now it is even $100 cheaper!
This monitor was so new back in November that not only was it not on Epinions, but it wasn't even on Viewsonic's web page. I emailed a contact person on their site to ask what the story is with this monitor, and a woman replied back that it wasn't on the web page yet due to a slip up, and it would show up in a few days. It finally appeared on Epinions a month later, but it took the assistance of a very helpful advisor to help get it added to the site for review.
Here are some of the monitor’s features.
1280x1024 at 60 Hz is the monitor’s native resolution.
300:1 high contrast, 220 nits high brightness
Weight 18 lbs.
2.2" deep panel
Also, it has a wall mount option, but I can’t imagine using it that way. Most people I know sit pretty close to their monitors regardless of the size and resolution, but I suppose it could be useful for presentations and kiosk type of settings.
There are integrated stereo speakers located just below the display. The sound is controlled by volume up, down and mute buttons on the monitor itself. These are 1.5 watt speakers and although convenient, do sound a little tinny as opposed to other built in monitor speakers that I have recently heard. I am certainly not an audiophile, but I have heard better from computer monitor speakers before, and much better from regular computer speakers. They will do just fine for someone who just needs to hear computer beeps and generic sounds in an office environment, but I don't recommend them for someone who listens to all his music on the computer, or regularly plays games.
The monitor comes with a power cable, an AC adapter for both European and U.S. design, a monitor cable (15 pin), and an audio cable for the integrated speakers.
Also included is a “Quick Start Guide”. This is actually not very helpful. It really covers only the stuff that is common knowledge, even for the computer literate. I don’t need a large poster diagram to show me how one plug goes into the wall socket and the other into the back of the computer. What should be on there are warnings on adjusting your graphic card if you already have a monitor hooked up, since you can’t go above a refresh rate of 85 Hz if you want to see anything other than an “Out of Range” error message displayed across your screen.
On the included CD-ROM are the real monitor instructions in a dozen or so languages. I think not including a printed version of the necessary pages was a mistake on Viewsonic’s part that will probably cost them more in technical support calls than in the paper and packaging. The instructions are only 20 pages in Adobe Acrobat, and 14 pages are worthless. They easily could have printed it and put it in the box considering how large the monitor box is, and how little is found inside.
Also found on the CD-ROM is True Internet Color Control panel. This is supposed to let you see accurate colors on the web. When you have the True Internet panel installed, when you visit a web page that was created with True Internet Color, an icon will appear on the taskbar that lets you know if the icon is or isn't in True Color. I don't know much about this, but I doubt it is that important, or that it will catch on. I haven’t seen a single page using it yet.
The monitor has three plugs in back. One for the video cable, one for the power adapter, and one for the speaker input. To get at where these three plugs go in, you have to pull off two large plastic panels. These don't come off very easy, and I would have to assume that after pulling them off and putting them on around 100 times, the little plastic tabs will break off forcing you to leave them off. It is hard to describe what these plastic panels look like, but they are an odd shape and it isn’t obvious how they come off at first, or how much force it takes.
One thing this monitor didn’t have that surprised me is dual input. Some of the other Viewsonic 17” LCD monitors have two input jacks, and you can switch between machines by pushing a button on the monitor. This would have been great at both the office and my home, where I have two machines now hooked up to a switch box. Having it built into the monitor would have been very convenient.
The built in monitor hardware options aren’t very different from any other Viewsonic monitor’s. It has the standard Button 1 - Down Arrow - Up Arrow - Button 2 Viewsonic configuration. One thing I hadn’t seen before is the powerlock feature. You can set it so that if the power goes out, the monitor will always try and turn back on.
One feature the monitor boasts is an “Auto Image Adjust” which is supposed to automatically size, center, auto-contrast and fine tune the video signal to eliminate any waviness or distortion. This is hard to tell if it works or not, but it sounds good.
Viewsonic says that the monitor’s viewing angle for left, right & down is 60 degrees, and up is 40 degrees. This doesn't seem to be entirely accurate, however. The brightness of the image is noticeably diminished at about 30 degrees. It only becomes completely washed out around the 60 degree mark.
I also think I should mention that if the graphic card is set out of range, the monitor politely tells me this with an on-screen message. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I worked with some large flat panel TV displays that simply looked blank when out of range and thus we received many technical support calls from people thinking the monitor had a problem when in reality it was their computer display settings.
I set up this monitor to work with a multiple desktop environment. I made the Viewsonic the second monitor along side a 21” older Viewsonic PT813 CRT. The graphic card is an ATI Dual Display Radeon that has two 15 pin output connectors on it. Using this monitor in a multiple desktop environment gave me a good basis to judge the advantage of one over the other. The LCD display is definitely brighter, clearer, easier on the eyes, and generally just looks better. I have even dragged a window so that it is split between the two monitors, and immediately noticed the difference between the two.
Actually, I was amazed at how bright this monitor seems. Since I was using it next to a Viewsonic PT813 21" monitor, the difference in brightness was amazing. I turned the VA 700's brightness down to the minimum, and turned up the PT813's to the maximum, and still everyone has commented on how much brighter the VA 700 is.
Normally I would say here that in a business environment, if you had both types of monitors, there would never be a reason to use the CRT over the LCD. However, LCDs do have a large drawback. They simply cannot change resolutions without a loss of image quality. It really wants to be in its native resolution, and lowering it gives me what looks like a distorted image. This means the monitor looks worse than the much cheaper CRT equivalents for people who commonly switch resolutions to watch a DVD or play games. There are probably some web pages where you want to change resolutions as well.
One thing all LCDs do suffer from is a 'blur' effect. Opening up a notebook window and dragging it around the screen quickly almost makes the text blur. The blacks seem to blur more than the whites. This isn't too much of a problem, but if I were doing CAD work, playing a game, or trying to watch a DVD, this could get to be a problem. I can’t recommend this monitor to game players, which is a shame, because that is the only reason I’m not willing to pay the extra money for one at home yet.
LCDs are best suited for office environments where one works at a consistent resolution. This monitor is the best price to quality ratio that I have seen for any of them yet!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 700
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
grimjack2
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 - Top 500 |
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Location: San Rafael, CA, Marin County
Reviews written: 181
Trusted by: 124 members
About Me:
Film is my favorite art form. I live a life of constant amelioration.
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