ADI Microscan 6P review

The 19in tube is still a relatively new arrival, so it's perhaps too soon to say whether the idea is catching on or not. ADI clearly feels that the concept is worth backing though, and has put its money on the table in the form of the Microscan 6P.

In a nutshell, the 19in concept is aimed at people who want more screen resolution but don't have either the space or the budget for a 21in monitor. On a physical level, all those that I've seen, including the Microscan 6P, succeed pretty well. The 6P weighs 20kg, which is a couple of kilos more than a heavy 17in monitor, and its cabinet is about 18.5in deep. I'd expect around 440mm for a modern 17in display based on a short-necked tube.

From the front, the Microscan looks modern and pleasingly sparse, with the controls reduced to brightness and contrast rotary controls tucked away under the lower bezel, and just three tiny buttons for controlling the on-screen setup menu. The stand was a bit wobbly and tended to stick when the cabinet was tilted, although it moved freely enough in the horizontal plane. This, it has to be said, is a common enough failing of monitor stands.

I was slightly disappointed to find that the monitor was fitted with a captive signal cable - detachable ones are a lot less trouble to replace if they develop a fault - but there's an ample supply of USB ports on the back panel. The Microscan's USB hub actually provides one upstream and four downstream (one-in, four-out) connections, but with USB still refusing to come out of the traps I couldn't say exactly how useful this might prove to be.

The review unit was supplied with a pair of speakers, which were designed by ADI to mount at either side of the cabinet. They deliver 3W per channel efficiently enough to be too loud for comfort at full volume if you're sitting right in front of the monitor. And the sound quality was refreshingly good, with punchy bass and a reasonably distinct top end that handled music playback surprisingly well. The only thing I didn't like about this arrangement was the fact that the speakers had their own mains transformer. This means another lead to deal with, and you need to have a mains plug socket within range. This could easily have been avoided by integrating the transformer into the monitor cabinet.

The tube has an 18in viewable image diagonal, producing a highly readable and sharply focused 1,024 « 768 resolution image that you can drive at vertical refresh rates as high as 116Hz. This is as it should be, but the real test of the concept is how well the tube copes with 1,280 x 1,024 - effectively beyond the practical capabilities of a 17in unit.

In this case, the results were acceptable, with a reasonably good, if not quite pin-sharp overall focus, and sufficient image area for text and screen objects to be just about large enough for the Windows environment to remain usable. Nevertheless, you're right on the ergonomic borderline here, and I really wouldn't want to have to spend several hours a day working on this or any other 19in tube running at 1,280 x 1,024 resolution.

At the end of the day, the Microscan does what it's supposed to do well, but there's no getting away from the fact that the 19in concept is a compromise.

Author: Dominic Bucknall