Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 73

Mitsubishi's Diamondtron, and latterly its Diamondtron Natural Flat, tubes find their way into monitors from other manufacturers, so it's interesting to see what Mitsubishi itself does. This latest addition features the flat-screen tube, and could be on its way to being this year's CRT of choice.

The Diamond Plus 73 is a general-purpose 17in display at an affordable £189, which dealer discounting will no doubt reduce further. It's nice enough to look at, with a plain and fairly angular bezel that sets off the flat screen, and a stylish set of curves even make it look good.

It weighs a reasonable 18.8kg, and the 420mm cabinet is shallower than that of a typical 17in monitor. The stand is clearly up to the job, but is rather stiff, especially when it comes to tilt, but this is a minor point and better than if it let the cabinet slip out of position.

There are no extras like integrated audio or a USB hub, which is arguably no great loss, but the signal cable is captive so should the cable fail, you'll have to send it all back for repair.

Mitsubishi has kept the controls both simple and traditional, with three buttons serving to invoke the OSD, select items and make adjustments. The simple icon palette style of the OSD itself is comprehensible at a glance and easy to navigate, especially as the full set of options is visible all the time.

The controls cover the expected ground well without going into too much detail, so you get pincushion and pin-balance, parallelogram, trapezoid and rotation corrections, but no fancy corner geometry tweaks. The same goes for colour correction, which is handled by three preset temperatures and a single RGB-adjustable custom channel.

Colour balance was fine straight out of the box, and just a little attention to geometry was required to get the image tidied up and sized out to produce its maximum 15.9in viewable diagonal, which is a good size from a 17in tube.

The picture was nice and bright, as you'd expect from an aperture-grille CRT. Also, the flat screen with its evaporated metal anti-glare treatment was reasonably untroubled by reflection and comfortable to view once the brightness level was set correctly.

This monitor is clearly intended for XGA use, which is the logical choice for its size. Go above XGA and the vertical refresh starts to drop, first to 75Hz at 1,152x870, and then to 65Hz at 1,280x1,024. This doesn't matter though, as you're exceeding ergonomic common sense above XGA anyway.

Focus was good overall, with no fuzzing at the centre or the corners, and fine detail reproduction was above average. The only fly in the ointment was the voltage regulation, typically visible as a bounce in the borders of the image when a large window was minimised or maximised against a dark background. Apart from this, it's a sound, good-value monitor.

Author: Dominic Bucknall