Hello!
I bought my monitor a week back (on Nov 5, 2005) as a replacement for my 17’’ ViewSonic CRT monitor (E70) for INR 14, 300/-. My CRT monitor was ageing out (almost 5 years), and at High resolution (1280x1024) the display was blurred. The small text on website was quite blurred and if you worked for 2 hours at a stretch trying to read, it would give a hangover headache. I spoke to my hardware dealer friend (Ashish Gandhi of Kompuserve, Secunderabad) who assured me that it can be fixed by simply re-focussing the beam mechanism.
But I also needed a monitor which put less strain on my eyes and on the small 500VA UPS I have. ViewSonic was my natural choice since I have been using products of this company before without any problems.
For facts, I have bought around 25 ViewSonic 17’’ CRT monitors till date without a single failure. Once we bought 30 LG 17’’ monitors and in burn-in tests, 40% failed. Samsung monitors have problems tackling India’s noisy power lines and tend to blow their power-on circuits. The single ViewSonic failure I have seen was bought by a friend of mine from a shady dealer against my recommendation.
The LCD specs are good - 17’’ viewable, 8ms pixel response, integrated 1W stereo speakers. Not documented clearly is the relatively higher power consumption - 60W as against 30W of brands like Samsung (Philips claims only 15W for its 15’’ monitors).
I have tested the monitor for pixel defects, geometry defects, color defects using AIDA v3.94. Not a single issue. I am yet to test the speakers. I have played DVDs on the monitor with amazing results. No pixel trails at all.
The Auto-Adjust of the monitor works quite well. Though for best results, I have found that you should either use utilities designed for this (these display fine horizontal & vertical lines) or simple open a very text oriented website on your web-browser (linux documentation for ex:). This helps the monitor logic finetune the display.
Currently my monitor is at 1280x1024x24bit at 60Hz resolution. I am assured that this is the native resolution of the monitor and it is designed to function best at this resolution. Even though at 60 Hz, the display is rock solid. No flickering effects at all.
The monitor supports color temperature apart from other geometrical settings. You probably never have to use geometry settings on LCD monitors in general. Apart from the 5000/5400/6500/9300K colour temperatures (basically variance from slightly red to slightly blue), the monitor support sRGB. sRGB is supposed to make the display and print of colours uniform between devices that support this setting. I am not sure how this works, but I find that the sRGB mode is most natural appearing to me.
The monitor comes with an external power adaptor. Though most monitors today integrate the power supply, this design is ok with me. For starters, my PC is on 24x7 and the monitor is generally on standby. Initially I was worried about the adaptor getting too hot, but I have checked that it only gets a bit warm. Besides, it is supposed to be covered by 3 years on-site warranty. And I have reasonable power protection in place (Servo Stabiliser chained to APC UPS).
Hopefully I will continue to have a good experience with this monitor as I have had with this brand before. Keeping my fingers crossed...
Update: Feb 8, 2006: The inbuilt speakers are disappointing. Not that I had any big expectations from them, but they are not at all loud and sound very tinny. No bass of any sort. Also, if the monitor enters power-saving mode, the speakers are switched off.
Consider my situation: My PC is On the whole day slogging away and I am not at the terminal. I depend on system sounds to keep me updated as to when a certain process has completed. Initially, hearing them through the Creative 5.1 was a pain - since it meant I had to keep the 5.1 powered the whole day just to hear an occasional bell. Also, hearing a system bell a full volume of 5.1 nearly gave me a heart attack more than once. So I rigged the onboard audio to be the default playback device and connected the monitor to it. This way, the system bells would sound through the monitor’s tiny speakers and be sufficient for me. Winamp was customized to send output to the Creative system and not the system default. so Winamp could play loudly and system beeps would not deafen me. As expected, I enable monitor blanking & suspend to save monitor life. To my horror I discovered that when the display is suspended, it also switches off the speakers. Hmm....looks like I will have to buy those 300/- un-amplified speakers after all.
Update: April 23, 2006 - I noticed that the monitor has started to show defects. In at-least two places, red sub-pixels are dead. As a result, if you viewing a red picture, the dead pixels show up as black dot. If you are viewing a white picture, the dead areas show up as blue dots. I spoke to viewsonic. They say I have to develop at-least 8 dead pixels before they will repair/replace. A promised visit from them 15 days back, to consider my case, has not yet materialised. Viewsonic australia has a 0-dead pixel policy. Viewsonic India as 8 or more (the worst) policy.
Update: Apr 30, 2007: The monitor has started to develop white streaks towards the top of the screen. Basically, horizontal lines of extra brightness have started to develop on the top third of the screen and they are growing in intesity. I have email ViewSonic and requested support. Will keep this thread updated.