ViewSonic PT775

ViewSonic is becoming an ever-larger player in the UK, successfully competing against the likes of Idek Iiyama and Sony. The PT775 is its latest launch into the lucrative 17in sector, where cost and ergonomic benefit are most effectively balanced.

The PT775 is based on a Mitsubishi Diamondtron tube which ViewSonic has renamed the SonicTron. This is a development of Sony's Trinitron technology, with the familiar vertically flat screen and faint horizontal traces from the wires supporting the aperture grille.

Another effect of the aperture grille approach is that the pixels it produces are rectangular rather than round, and the gaps between adjacent phosphor dots of the same colour (the 'dot pitch') are smaller than usual. This helps to produce good edge definition and so improve fine detail reproduction.

Installation is simple enough, but it's clear that the meaning of plug and play is far from universal. A thorough installation requires you to manually update the Windows Registry using a disk supplied with the monitor. Plug and play should have eradicated the need to fiddle around with install disks.

There's a choice of inputs, with a five-way BNC as well as the usual D-SUB VGA connector, and the panel is moderately recessed to make it easier to push the monitor up against the wall. This could be necessary, as the cabinet is a little deeper than average for a 17in Diamontron-based unit, measuring 457mm front to back.

There's a modest row of control buttons that let you call up and use the on-screen setup menus. These are crisp and tidy affairs with none of the chunkiness seen on some cheaper monitors. Their use is largely self-explanatory, except for some of the more advanced features.

All the major geometry corrections are covered, including barrel/pincushion, trapezoid and parallelogram, and there's a rotation control, three pre-set colour temperatures, a custom colour channel with individual RGB adjustments, and both horizontal and vertical convergence tuners.

The tube is likely to be a match for any reasonable mode you throw at it, with support for 1,280 « 1,024 at a good, solid 89Hz vertical refresh. The all-important 1,024 « 768 mode can be driven anywhere up to a slightly odd maximum of 119.4Hz. During testing I chose my preferred 1,024 « 768 at 85Hz and was rewarded with a comfortable and stable image.

The overall focus was very good with a uniform degree of sharpness from the centre to the extreme corners of the image. Small text, such as that in the small fonts used in Explorer file name listings, was entirely readable. The background white was fairly accurate and the only apparent flaw was a slight blue-green discolouration at the right side of the screen.

Despite its top performance, the ViewSonic is a little on the pricey side compared with the current crop of 17in monitors. The Taxan is more than £100 less and almost as good.

Author: Dominic Bucknall