Taxan Valuevision 1910 TCO 99

With 19in monitors currently priced in the region of £350, the Taxan Valuevision 1910 lives up to its name with a price of only £235. Given that discounting will bring the street price down further, this is a remarkably inexpensive piece of kit.

The monitor is based on a 19in tube which, while not impressively short in the neck, is still reasonably compact, with an overall cabinet depth of 460mm. The tilt/swivel stand supports the cabinet without slippage, but the unit has a top-heavy feel to it and the cabinet will wobble if the table is nudged.

Signal input is via a single captive cable. This is expected given the low price, so if you're unlucky enough to get a fault the monitor will have to be returned to the dealer for repair. Again, given the low price we weren't too disappointed to find an absence of BNC inputs or a powered USB hub.

Taxan has long since sorted out its OSDs, and the Valuevision benefits from its experience in this area. The external controls are minimal - just four buttons below the bezel - and the actual OSD is clear, quick to navigate and simple to follow.

The geometry controls are also comprehensive without being too detailed. Nothing important is omitted, with adjustments for rotation and pin-balance as well as the essential trio of parallelogram, trapezoid and pincushion. The range is more than sufficient to deal with any normal level of distortion.

Colour tuning is looked after by a selection of three preset colour temperatures and one fully RGB-adjustable custom channel if you want to define your own settings.

Like most 19in monitors the Valuevision's specifications extend to a maximum resolution of 1,600x1,200, which it supports at a vertical refresh of 75Hz. Although the headroom is welcome, this is unrealistic on a tube of this size; the first usable results are 1,280x1,024 at a flicker-free vertical refresh of 85Hz. Even so, this is pushing the limit for a 19in tube with both text and screen objects too small. Fine focus isn't especially sharp at this resolution, which further reduces general readability in this mode. Stepping down to 1,280x960 improved things, but we were happiest with the image at 1,152x864, which is often the case with 19in monitors.

At 1,152x864 everything is about the same size as XGA appears on a 17in tube, only with more screen real estate. The focus was noticeably better in this mode too, although the Valuevision didn't manage the absolute crispness of the best-quality shadow-mask tubes.

Geometry was good, as were colour purity and brightness, and voltage regulation was excellent with no visible jump in image size during the white/black blink tests. The only problems we noticed were with some slight and largely ignorable moirÚ at the sides of the picture, plus a little too much reflection from the screen surface.

On the whole though, the Valuevision is sound. The range of controls is appropriate, and picture quality is acceptable for what is effectively a budget product. If you want the extra resolution afforded by a 19in tube but don't fancy paying for it, this could be what you're looking for

Author: Dominic Bucknall