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Posted: Mon, November 15, 2004

Viewsonic VP171s 17" ThinEdgeTM Digital LCD Display

Viewsonic VP171S

Mark Kiddell reviews the Viewsonic VP171s 17" ThinEdgeTM Digital LCD Display.
Current Prices: between £269 and £330, worth shopping around to find the best price.

Main Benefits:
  • Excellent image quality
  • A fast response time of 16ms and a contrast ratio of 500:1 make it perfect for the gamer.
  • Anti-glare surface, minimal glare on the screen even in an office with a window behind.
    • 3 inputs, 2 D-Sub and 1 DVI
  • Multiple analogue and digital inputs: the ViewSonic has two 15 pin D-Sub connectors and one digital DVI connector allowing up to 3 devices to be connected to it simultaneously. Both a D-Sub and a DVI cable are provided with the unit. Quick switching between the displays is provided via a single press to a button on its control panel.
  • With a typical power consumption of less than 35W, its also much cheaper to run that your average CRT monitor (90 Watts). Also, the power supply is internal and accepts the standard "kettle lead" style connector.
  • The screen comes with Pivot Pro an excellent piece of software that allows the screen to be used vertically


the ViewSonic and Paint Shop Pro

Typically Websites are designed for 800x600 and 1024x768 pixel screens (1024 dots across by 800 dots down) - therefore the screens native resolution is not ideal for web designers, you either run the screen in 1024x768 mode and get a distorted image, or you run in 1280x1024 mode and have to resize your web browser to the correct size. However, Pivot Pro 7.50 is provided with the ViewSonic and allows you to rotate your entire desktop by 90, 180, or 270 degrees. When rotated by 90 degrees this provides a resolution of 1024x1280 - a far better choice for web designers as it allows a web browser to be permanently open at 1024x768 and also allows space for the web editing tool to be visible above or below at the same time.

a document at 94pctvertically aligned screen

Pivot Pro also offers significant benefits to people that regularly use word processing packages and/or publishing software. At 100% zoom, almost an entire page can be seen on the screen at once, allowing you to edit your flyers/document layouts with a much better impression of how it will appear in the final print version whilst being able to read the document clearly. In tests, a full A4 spread is visible at 94% zoom with the default toolbars in Microsoft Word 2000.

On our test unit, noticeable flicker could be seen whilst in Portrait mode as the display updates minor changes to the screen. The flickering is not present whilst in Landscape mode.

There were also minor graphical glitches with Pivot Pro, for example while scrolling a document and opening multipage documents in MS Word.


glitch whilst scrollingglitch on opening a document

Conclusion

TFT's are only really good at their natural resolution, in any lower resolution, there is visible distortion in the image. Although big and cumbersome, good quality CRT monitors do produce a much more vibrant picture and there is no motion blurring whatsoever whereas all TFT's have some level of motion blurring, no matter how fast their response time.

This is a great all round screen and is suitable for gamers, office users, web designers, and casual users.

Overall rating: 9/10



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