Sony GDM-F500

This is the second flat screen monitor reviewed this month and no doubt there'll be more to follow once the modified Trinitron and Diamondtron tubes become more widely available. In essence, the engineers at Sony and Mitsubishi have taken the existing vertically flat screen design to its logical conclusion and made it flat, or as near as makes no difference, in the horizontal plane as well.

This promising idea has been given the full treatment in the GDM-F500. It boasts a 21in FD Trinitron tube capable of a 19.5in image diagonal. The monitor weighs in like a sumo wrestler and, although it's packaged sensibly so it can be unboxed on the floor, care needs to be taken when moving the 34kg bulk around. It's advisable to seek the assistance of a colleague.

Although large displays are popular among city traders simply wanting as many numbers in view as possible, they're also intended to deliver exemplary image quality for those who need it. Consequently, in addition to the normal 15-pin VGA socket they should also be equipped with a five-way BNC cable connector, as this one is, to ensure the best possible image quality at higher resolutions.

The unit also acts as a modest USB hub with two downstream ports built into the base of its stand. However, what really caught my eye was the unusual control mechanism. Instead of buttons or rotary controls you get a mini-joystick which can be pushed in in order to select options and controls in the on-screen menu. This arrangement works surprisingly well and it proved to be one of the more usable and straightforward setups I've come across recently.

As you'd expect on a monitor of this quality, there's no shortage of controls, with both geometry and colour customisation amply catered for. The individual controls are mostly visually self-explanatory and I didn't feel the need for the manual - which was just as well as this was in Japanese.

You get vertical refresh support in spades, with theoretical maximums well in excess of the capabilities of normal graphics adaptors in XGA and 1,280 x 1,024 modes, which is good to know. The tube held up well as far as picture brightness and colour purity were concerned too, and I wouldn't want to understate how impressive the 19.5in diagonal flat screen is. This is one monitor that will turn heads.

Focus was good across the screen in XGA and 1,280 x 1,024 modes, and the screen remained readable even in 1,600 x 1,200 mode, albeit with some loss of sharpness at the sides of the picture. The same ergonomic argument that applies to the viability of 1,280 x 1,024 on a 19in tube operates when you run in 1,600 x 1,200 on a 21in screen. Yes, it does works on good examples - and this was a good example - but it's not absolutely ideal. Personally, I'd be inclined to stick at 1,280 x 1,024 resolution, which this display delivered very convincingly, and trade off the loss of workspace area against rather better readability and fine detail reproduction.

Author: Dominic Bucknall