ADI Microscan 5G

With a street price of just £425, the Microscan is quite affordable as 17in monitors go. Judging from this and other recent units, a sensible price no longer means a skimpy feature set and/or a lousy tube. In fact, there wasn't any real indication from the outside that the ADI was designed to a budget. Unlike a number of cheaper monitors, which have either a standard VGA signal input or a captive cable, it has inputs for both the normal 15-pin D-plug and for a five-way BNC cable. The only thing that wasn't quite right was the stand, which was a bit too loose and allowed the cabinet to slip until it was tilted up to its maximum angle.

The controls are mounted on a similar hinged block system to the Mitsubishi 67TXV, which keeps them out of the way when they aren't required and presents them at an accessible angle when they are. Although the ADI has an on-screen setup display (OSD), only part of the functionality on offer has been moved on to it. Many of the more basic controls have buttons of their own, but some are hidden until you evoke the advanced settings OSD, while others are the secondary function on a button which you need to press twice to get to them. Fortunately, monitors generally only need setting up once, so you should find a control for all you to want to alter.

There's two pincushion settings - one for the edge centre and one for the edge corners - plus omnidirectional side concavity correction, a rotation control, and detailed horizontal and vertical linearity tuners. You also get three separate colour channels, that can be customised by altering the red, green and blue gun intensities, which helps if you do a lot of colour printing and want to match your monitor to the characteristics of one or more printers.

None of this would be much use without a decent picture, but fortunately the ADI managed very well here, too. The lightly curved FST-type screen surface has an effective anti-glare, anti-reflective coating, and a fairly large 15.75in viewable diagonal, but it's the pin-sharp overall focus that catches the eye. Focus combined with the small 0.26mm dot pitch really helps the readability of small text at 1,024 resolution, and, if your graphics card is up to it, the sky's the limit with vertical refresh rates. If 85Hz isn't enough, you can go as close to the 119Hz maximum as your card will allow.

All in all, an impressive FST monitor, that's marginally sharper than the Microvitec but not as clear and bright as the Mitsubishi. If street prices are as low as predicted, it's definitely worth a look.

Author: Dominic Bucknall