Product Reviews

This 20" display comes from ViewSonic's Pro Series of LCD monitors, and certainly lives up to the 'Pro' part of its name in its looks and features. The thin black bezel looks smart and businesslike, while at the back there are D-sub (VGA) and DVI inputs, a four-port USB2 hub and an integrated power supply and cable tidy. The USB hub is a little inaccessible, being hidden at the back of the screen, but this keeps cable clutter down if you use it to attach permanent desktop-bound USB peripherals.

The stand allows you to turn and tilt the screen with ease, and the ability to raise it to 15cm above desk level is particularly welcome as this encourages better posture. You can also pivot the screen to use it in portrait mode, although the fact that the cables attach to the screen rather than the base is a slight hindrance, as they get pulled around as it pivots. The accompanying Pivot Pro software switches the computer's output between landscape and portrait modes, but it crashed one of our test PCs on installation, and we had to uninstall it in Safe Mode to get the PC working again.

Image quality is generally pretty good, with none of the sharpness problems we've seen from other 20" LCDs recently. Block colours are smooth across

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the entire screen, and viewing angles are possibly as wide as we've ever seen from an LCD, with bright, accurate colours no matter where we sat. Fast-moving graphics look sharp, thanks to a 16ms response time.

Our monitor test patterns revealed some flaws, though. Crosshatched patterns showed that the Auto-adjust function didn't tune to the analogue signal perfectly, displaying swirling interference where there should have been a static image. Fortunately, the manual Fine Tune control in the slightly fiddly OSD made the interference almost imperceptible, and connecting via DVI eradicated it completely.

The VP201b struggled in our greyscale test, too, failing to give a smooth transition from black to white. It lacked definition in darker shades, displaying the darkest 15 per cent of the test pattern as black. In the lighter areas, bands of inaccurate brightness and hue were clearly visible where there should have been a smooth transition of shades.

The same problem was perceptible in our colour wheel test, which few other displays have struggled with. This made us concerned for the monitor's ability to display photographs accurately, but in practice only the lack of definition in dark areas of photos was really noticeable. Otherwise, its colour accuracy was pretty good, with natural skin tones and clean whites once we'd set the manual colour temperature control to our liking. Colours were vibrant, but not unrealistically so.

Our concerns over image quality mean we can't recommend the ViewSonic VP201b for graphic design, although it's unlikely to pose a serious problem for most other uses. While the same amount of cash could buy two high-quality 17" LCDs, the price is pretty reasonable for a 20" model, especially considering the integrated USB2 hub and attractive, highly functional design.