ViewSonic LED Monitor

Pros: Everything described about this monitor is awesome! Crystal clear panel, fast response time, energy saving, and sexy looking at a very affortable price!

EVERYONE WHO BOUGHT THIS MONITOR PLEASE NOTE THIS: If you find that after plugging in this monitor to your PC running window Vista or 7 through HDMI and noticed that the texts suddently got blurry and fuzzy, then follow these steps to remedy this problem.

*Go to Input Select option, change the HDMI 1 and/or HDMI 2 input from AV to PC. This will make your window texts crystal clear again =)

• 1 star for wasting my time on resarching for this solution.

PICTURE:
Going from my old 19" 4:3 screen to this is like playing games on a whole new computer. Going from a much smaller res to 1920×1080 gives me a whole new gaming experience: I can see more and the info display in-game takes up less of my screen real-estate. The picture is sharp… It's very, very nice.

SPEAKERS:
I tried the built-in speakers (with and without the SRS sound processing app on) – they're really tinny, like listening to hold music over the phone. They'd be fine for the office – listening to your computer go “bing” when you get an email, but not satisfactory for gaming or listening to music. Just use a separate speaker system instead.

VGA INPUT:
Initially I used the suppllied VGA cable as I have DVI out from my graphic card (with a DVI to VGA adapter) – the picture was sharp, fast awesome and 100% satisfactory.

HDMI INPUT and TROUBLESHOOTING:
I decided to purchase a DVI to HDMI adapter and use the supplied HDMI cables to avoid the Digital>Analo­gue>Digital conversion that the VGA cable creates. This is where I ran into the problem that Darren and others have mentioned. The image on the screen had a 1-inch black border around it – ie, it wasn't filling up the screen, and it looked a bit fuzzy. Took me a while to find a fix, so here are the steps I used:

1. Using the controls on the side of the monitor, switch from HDMI-AV to HDMI-PC. This stops the text being so fuzzy, but still didn't give the the sharpness that I had with the VGA cables, and didn't fill the screen.
2. Tried Darren's advice on changing the scaling on the ATI Catalyst graphics card driver, but couldn't find the place to change the scaling. Here's a step-by-step once I figured it out:

• Right-click on your desktop, open the Catalyst Control Centre.
• Select “Desktops and Displays”
• Right-click the little monitor down the bottom and choose “Configure”
• Under the Attributes tab, select “Enable GPU scaling”
• Under the Scaling Options tab, slide Underscan all the way to the right (0%).

Voila! An instantly clear and full screen, with no more issues.

I saw the special for this monitor and on an impluse decided I couldn't pass it up. And I do not regret it. This monitor is great for the price. I wasn't sure if I would notice any change from my old viewsonic 22" lcd but I did. Colours in game are much richer and dynamic. And the sound is a huge step up. Even though the built in speakers won't compare to a real sound system for what they are they are good. And the sound software system included with the monitor really boosts the sound and volume of all your movies and music. My old monitor had built in speakers, same power but just doesn't compare.

I was surprised how nocticably bigger the screen is compared to my old one. But being ultra thin and stylish it fits perfectly on my desk and looks great.

Service from Mightape was good. I order the monitor on a Tuesday afternoon and had it by Thursday morning even though it came from their supplier and not from mightyape direct. So well done.

Only con I think to this monitor is the stand. It is not height adjustable and doesn't turn, just tilts.

Major improvement over my older monitor (Philips 107), beautiful colour reproduction, nice brightness, nice whites, and clear.

Setup was not exactly plug'n'play. The monitor comes with an HDMI cable (nice inclusion), but it did take a bit of fiddling about in the Catalyst display driver panel to fix my blurry text problem.

As pointed out, you set the HDMI display to “PC”, but that's not all you need to do. By default the Catalyst driver is set to do “underscanning” – so head to the Scaling Options in Catalyst and slide the slider all the way to the right (0 percent underscan).

The built-in speaker sound is not really that great to be honest, but listening through the headphone socket I must say it's better than my on-board sound chip at the least.

For the price, the quality of the image and the perfect size make this a no brainer purchase if you're looking to upgrade a 4:3 display.

I use this sreen for both PS3 and PC and it is a great quality screen. But the only downfall I noticed was the terrible speakers with the sound being very tinny.
Despite that I am extremely happy with my purchase and I would highly recommend this product as long as you have an alternative system for sound.