Product Reviews

One of the best things about Apple's range of flat-panel monitors is their competitive price. However, other manufacturers are now producing even more affordable flat-panel displays.

Admittedly, the bland, beige design of this 15in monitor is nowhere near as cute as that of Apple's Studio Displays and the product name is decidedly dreary. However, Diamond Technology's XEN-1510P is so cheap that it's easy to forgive its unremarkable appearance.

At £330, the XEN-1510P is almost £120 cheaper than Apple's rival 15in flat-panel display. Its design is utterly innocuous and inoffensive, being moulded in beige plastic with all the screen controls placed immediately below the main screen area. It works well, though, and provides good image quality.

Installation is straightforward, as the monitor merely needs to have its power supply and video cable plugged in. There is some software supplied so you can control the monitor's menus directly from a PC, but this software isn't Mac-compatible so Mac users will have to use the control buttons mounted just below the main screen area.

The image geometry and colour settings are controlled by four simple buttons. The Menu button activates the on-screen menu and there are two Forward/Back buttons that allow you to navigate through the menus. Pressing the Select button takes you into each specific submenu and the Forward/Back buttons then come into play again, this time allowing you to increase or decrease the selected settings.

It's a setup

Our only minor criticism of

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the monitor's setup procedure is that the power and video connectors are tucked away, facing downwards, on a small panel at the back of the monitor. This means you have to turn either yourself or the monitor upside down to connect the cables. And, like Apple's own monitors, the XEN-1510P doesn't allow you to alter its height, although its large flat base does at least allow you to put it on a raised stand. As with Apple's monitors, you can't swivel the display unless you pick up the entire unit and rotate it from side to side.

Once set up, the monitor works well and produces a bright, sharp image with no flicker or ghosting. However, its low price inevitably results in a few compromises.

Stay sharp

The monitor uses an analogue VGA connector, so it can be used with any graphics card with a VGA socket. This makes it a good choice for those with older Macs that can't use the current generation of digital displays, which have a clearer and sharper image. However, we really couldn't find anything to criticise in the XEN-1510P's image quality when running at its native 1024 x 768 pixel resolution. However, the image quality did drop quite noticeably when running at 800 x 600 pixels and Apple's monitors definitely do a better job when scaling the image down to lower resolutions.

There's one other important limitation. The XEN-1510P can only display 18-bit colour, or 262,144 colours. That's a lot less than the 16 million colours (24-bit) that your Mac's graphics card can display and which can be displayed by just about every other CRT or LCD display. This means that the monitor won't be any use to designers or graphics specialists, but they wouldn't want a 15in monitor anyway.

You might also run into problems with some games that have a 24-bit colour mode and it's possible that owners of digital cameras and camcorders will prefer a 24-bit display.

Many people will consider this an acceptable compromise for such a cheap monitor, and the XEN-1510P will be perfectly adequate for many home and business users who simply want to do a bit of word processing, use spreadsheets or surf the Internet.