Got a new LCD monitor

[markc]

My old Viewsonic E790 19" CRT has served me well, but it wasn't until recently that I noticed had bad it had been getting. I've been using a ColorVision Spyder to keep it balanced, but the brightness was dying. If I bring up a greyscale gradient in 20 blocks, the darkest 8 look black unadjusted. Even with the Spyder doing it's thing, the best it can get is 6 blocks all looking the same as black.

I've been putting off getting a new monitor because companies just aren't making the good CRTs anymore, and it didn't look like the LCD tech was really there yet. I felt I had to get somthing, though. After looking into it, I found some good LCDs, but they were pretty expensive. And then finally I came across some reviews for the Viewsonic VP930b. It looks to be the best average-Joe-priced LCD for all around work. It's fast enough for gaming, and the color accuracy is good enough for Photoshop work.

So I decided to get one and spent about $335 for it at Newegg (shipped free when I ordered). Good grief, this thing is bright! Okay, that's just because it's an LCD, and I'm comparing it to my old monitor. I haven't done a lot with it yet, but after calibrating it with the Spyder, I brought up some images in Photoshop and spent a few minutes with it in Halflife 2: Episode 1. Nice! It hurts my eyes a little bit when reading e-mail, but hopefully I'll get used to it. And it looks like I got lucky and don't have any dead or hot pixels.

So if anyone is contimplating a new LCD, I think it would be a good monitor to check out.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824116365
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/11/17/viewsonic_vp930_lcd_monitor/index.html

 

[Dweller]

Thanks for the post! My desktop is currently dominated by a 21" and a 19" CRT and I really want to dump them both for a couple of 19" LCDs (well, one at first then another later) but I also have the dual role of work and gaming.

8ms is as "slow" as I am comfortable going with gaming and it sounds like from your review that it works well.

 

[Don Simon]

I can highly recommend AG Neovo if you're on a budget. Mine is a 19" with 12ms and DVI, I don't do much gaming but it did work great with Half-Life 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 (the latter being reasonably fast-paced) with no ghosting or anything. One dead pixel. Doesn't bother me. Ridiculously cheap. Unfortunately that model's now been replaced by another with the same name but with a higher contrast ratio but 4ms instead of 12. I'd still recomment the company though if cost is an issue.