The true picture

The single most important item of your PC is the monitor. Whilst this is often compromised to make way for other component upgrades, ironically a monitor can be replaced but not upgraded. Now you don't have to make any compromises as 17" monitor prices are more than affordable. CRT (cathode ray tube) has served us for a long time, not only as part of our PC's. You see them in shops, ATMs and nearly every television set has one. You may be forgiven to assume the technology has not evolved very much except in the manufacturing techniques used. With this in mind, we requested manufacturers for high end monitors. With the advent of short-neck and standard CRTs, including FST (Flat screen technology), and the competitive nature of the market, we hoped we wouldn't be disappointed.

We received quite a variety of standards in the monitors we were sent although they were all high quality units. Obviously there is a wide range of monitors available at the moment, but it is just not practical to see them all especially in what is a comparatively small product test.

How we carried out our test

Normally in our labs we test computers using Sysmark 2000 amongst others as a benchmark although this is totally meaningless for monitors. We carried out exhaustive tests using Displaymate (www.displaymate.com) which has the ability to generate hundreds of test patterns designed to highlight any flaws in monitors. All our tests were carried out in 1024 x 768 resolution at 32 bit colour depth and 85Hz vertical refresh rate. We used an Abit BE6-II Motherboard, 128Mb SDRAM, and the popular 32Mb Diamond Viper 770 AGP (TNT2) Video Card. Rather than having a definite result at the end of the testing, each pass or failure is more susceptible to the opinion (or eyesight!) of the person actually doing the review. We tried to achieve some consistency by getting opinions from three different people for each test so it wasn't just down to one individual.

Setup

This part of the test determines the fine image sharpness, colour scales to ensure sharp reproduction on the monitor, black and white levels are set correctly, testing for glare and specular (mirror-like) reflections, brightness and contrast controls are set correctly, and checks the colour level intensity.

Geometry & Distortion

The test checks to see whether the brightness and contrast controls are set correctly, and checks and determines the monitor's black-level and white level.

Sharpness & Resolution

This uses finer detailed images to check the monitor's capabilities in showing more definition by displaying very fine horizontal and vertical lines on the screen.

Colour & Greyscale

The colour and greyscale tests are pretty much as they sound by displaying all main primary colours and their derivatives. They also have totally contrasting colours, such as black next to white, to show any signs of streaking or ghosting on the screen.

Next