Viewsonic VE175 17" LCD Monitor

Product Description

With high brightness and contrast ratio, the ViewSonic VE175 17" LCD display produces sharp images, crisp text and lifelike colors in an attractive, compact design. The SuperClearMVA technology ensures wide viewing angles and superior clarity for moving images. Other convenient features include AutoTune, OSD/Power lock functions and a base, which folds up 90 degrees for wall mounting. With an optimum resolution of 1280x1024, brightness of 250 nits and contrast ratio of 550: 1, the 17" VE175 is generous on features and frugal for your budget.

Customer Reviews:

Exceptional picture........2003-12-04

I have never been disappointed with Viewsonic and continue to buy their high quality products.

This monitor has an exceptional picture and required no setup what so ever. It came with a cdrom to optimize the picture but if it can get any better than straight out of the box, I would not be able to tell the difference.

The picture is so bright and clear and colorful that it can easily be viewed from another room and from an obtuse angle. I can glance over from the living room while my 2 year old is playing Dora, Spongebob, or cruising on NickJr to see if he is stuck and needs help.

Simply plugged it in and it worked. Highly recommended. Very thin front to back and is currently on my toddler's Little Tykes wooden computer desk (also highly recommended). The screen angle is adjustable. The base is slotted to drop the cords through if your desk allows it. Very stable base. I have no concerns that it will fall over on my child.

One key thing to remember about LCD monitors is that they almost all have a natural resolution of 1280x1024 and are viewed optimally at this ratio. Setting to a larger picture ratio like 1024x768 can show some text distortion if you plan on doing a lot of editing in certain fonts due to a stretching effect. However, that will not affect the clarity or color. Analog monitors are completely different and you must manually adjust your screen anytime you change resolution, no so with the LCD, they auto scale if you change resolution.

Poor picture quality.......2003-11-12

I purchased this monitor a few days ago. At first I found the picture quality mediocre but acceptible. However, after using the monitor for a few days I now realize that it is not acceptible and I plan to return the monitor. As I mentioned in a previous review, there are fuzzy halos around type. Also, reds and greens in certain areas are blurry. In general, this display is not nearly as clear and sharp as other LCD displays I've seen, such as the displays of laptops I've owned. I made sure that I had my machine set to 32 bit color. I called Viewsonic tech support, and after confirming that I was running it at the optimal refresh rate (60 hz) and resolution (1280 by 1024), they had no suggestions except to try it on a different computer or return it.

Reasonably good.......2003-11-10

I received this monitor a few days ago. Setting it up was very easy. The software installed fine on my Windows XP machine. There are no dead pixels as of now. On the whole I'm pretty happy with it, however I'm not giving it five stars because the picture quality is only so-so. The colors are bright but there are minor artifacts around the letters in black text against a tan or grey backgroud. They're like the fuzzy blemshes that appear when you apply a sharpening filter in an image editing program such as Photoshop and you set the amount of sharpening too high. There may be a way to improve the image using the monitor's controls. I haven't been able to get a really good setting so far. The controls for adjusting the picture are fairly primitive and the documentation is minimal.

This monitor is OK but if I ever get another flat panel monitor I'll try a different brand.

**VERY** clear text, but other issues.......2003-10-31

Pros:
- Text is extremely crisp & clear. Even on my 21" CRT, 1280x1024 looks fuzzy and unclear, but on this display, it is perfectly fine.
Cons:
- Hard to configure to display image properly - auto adjust is not consistent and requires some manual adjustment, but once setup properly, text is VERY clear
- The lighting is a little uneven: it looks a little darker in the center and lighter on the sides - but this seems to be an issue with even more expensive 17" LCD models, perhaps I am being too picky.
- I tried playing a first person shooter and the response was pretty bad - lot of ghosting

I love this monitor!.......2003-09-28

I purchased this LCD monitor based on a friend's recommendation. It is excellent. Unbelievably thin, unbelievably light, and unbelievably cool (temperature-wise), compared to CRT monitors. It is supposed to use much less power, too. I still have trouble getting used to it, since it just looks like my computer disappeared! The picture quality is much better, and it has a number of preset color settings.

The neatest thing about this monitor is that it syncs itself (automatically or with the push of 1 button). No more sliding the screen horizontally, or vertically, no more resizing, no more gymnastics with trapezoid and pincushion. You plug it in, it works perfect. Another major advantage compared to CRTs is the screen size. CRT monitors that advertise 17" usually have a considerably smaller viewable screen area (typically 16" or so). This means that EVEN IF you increase your screen size to the limit, the length of the diagonal will be no more than 16". With this monitor, the viewable area IS 17", effectively larger than any CRT 17" you may be used to, so you get your money's worth of screen area. Furthermore the screen is totally flat, and there is no distortion whatsoever, so parts of the screen near the edge have just as good a picture as the center. No CRT can compete with that.

On the con side, a noteworthy issue is the size ratio. The two most common resolutions are 1024x768 and 1280x1024. These refer to the number of horizontal pixels relative to the number of vertical pixels. Note that the actual width:height ratios are different between those two settings. The lower resolution (1024x768) corresponds to a wider 4:3, whereas the higher resolution (1280x1024) is a more squarish 5:4. Most CRT monitors are designed with a width:height ratio somewhere in between so either resolution can be used. This monitor, however, is optimized for the higher resolution (1280x1024), meaning the screen is more squarish than usual. The result is that words will be squished horizontally if you try using it at the lower resolution. On the other hand, 17" is still a bit small for reading window's large fonts clearly at the higher resolution. I therefore also ended up changing the Windows font sizes from the Desktop Properties -> Appearance.

As others have pointed out: the monitor is so thin there is no place to stick a webcam. That might be a problem for some.

Despite these two minor issues, I highly recommend it.

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