Very nice, but not perfect, LCD for gamers

Author's Rating:

Pros: Light, fast refresh for an LCD. Vivid, accurate colors. Simple to operate.

Cons: Not as responsive as CRT's. Best only at 1280x1024. Can't disable annoying "Digital" message.

The Bottom Line: 
If you're a gamer, this is about as good as LCD's get (September, 2005). For some, that may not be good enough. For non-gamers, this is an excellent LCD.

Author's Review
I came to the ViewSonic VP191B after years of using top CRT displays. I had been wary of buying an LCD display for several reasons.

1) I was concerned about the refresh rates and the motion blur that results from poor response times. I'm a gamer so this was of prime concern.

2) I was concerned about being limited, effectively, to one native resolution.

3) I was worried about getting a display with dead pixels.

My workhorse CRT display (a 22" Viewsonic) died recently and I figured it might finally be time to try out an LCD display. Family and friends who are also gamers kept telling me that their LCD's were just fine for games.

I did some research and found that there was a lot of positive feedback (including here) on this monitor. I decided to give it a shot. I found it on www.zipzoomfly.com for $427. Understand that the last time I bought a monitor, CRT's of the quality I wanted ran well over $1,000 and mine was $3,000 when it first came out so getting a display for under $500 seemed like a good deal to me.

The monitor arrived and I started to unpack it. The first thing I noticed was how unwieldy it was to work with. The stand was in the way most of the time and it tended to flop around so much that I had to take extra care not to drop it.

I also found that it was difficult to easily plug in the power cord and video cable. All the connections are on the bottom edge of the monitor facing downward so it's not a simple matter of just setting the display on a desk and plugging in everything.

My next issue was that the cable supplied, a 6' cable, wasn't long enough as my tower PC is further away than normal. I had to run to CompUSA to grab a DVI cable and was shocked to find that the only DVI cable they had was $80. I picked it up anyway and plugged it in when I got it home.

The stand allows you to move the monitor to any height from touching the desk up several inches. The display itself can also be tilted from slightly downward to about 20% upward. The back of the stand also has 3 clips for holding and hiding the two cables.

Setup in Windows was fairly simple and the display jumped to life perfectly aligned at the monitor edges unlike any CRT setup. Within minutes I was up and running at near optimum settings.

My first concern--refresh response rate, was supposed to be a non-issue with this monitor. It's rated at 8ms. Popular hardware review sites and other users claimed that anything below 16ms response time removed any concern in this area. It didn't work out that way for me. The first couple of games I brought up clearly showed motion blur. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as I had anticipated and was much improved over my various laptop displays but it was still clearly much slower to respond than any CRT I'd ever used. Take, for example, the case of Flight Simulator. Playing on a CRT, I can move around an airport and clearly read the text on the side of any plane while moving. With this display, the text was absolutely stunning while stationary. Once I started moving, the text immediately became a blur that was not fully readable until I once again stopped moving. Other games have exhibited the same symptom. On standard Windows apps, the issue is not a concern. Those look and respond perfectly fine.

The monitor comes set with a native resolution of 1280x1024. I had wanted to go larger than 19" LCD but every decent LCD I saw at 20" or greater also came with a native 1600x1200 resolution. At my age (currently 41) I'm starting to have a hard time seeing small print and I'm far from alone. 1600x1200 not only is too small for me on a 20"-22" display but also requires a lot more horsepower for a PC to provide for games. Plus most games do not support anything close to 1600x1200.

The general view seemed to be that even if I couldn't get a game to load at 1280x1024 that it would look just fine at a lower resolution. LCD displays have to essentially emulate any resolution other than their native one. The very first game I loaded that was limited to 1024x768 clearly showed me that the emulated resolution was not very impressive. Everything looked slightly out of focus and text detail was often lacking. Some LCD monitors allow you to set a mode called 1:1 mode which would effectively force the game into the native resolution but, sadly, ViewSonic does not offer that feature with this particular model (though it is offered in other LCD models they produce). On the plus side, I have found that most of my games and software have no problem working at 1280x1024. I did prefer to run Flight Simulator at 1600x1200 and that's not an option here as the 1280x1024 is also the maximum resolution of this monitor.

As far as my dead pixel concern, I initially thought I had no dead pixels and then found that I had one minor dead pixel in the lower left of the display but it was essentially so dull as to be nearly invisible except on white screens. Frankly, this is one issue that, as a consumer, I am not willing to accept the current business perspective that defects are to be expected. This one is not enough to get upset about but vendors suggesting that 4, 6, 8 or even 10 or more dead pixels is not worth of replacement are simply not doing justice to their customers. The first company that commits to providing monitors with no dead pixels will end up with quite a following. Dead pixels are defects and no level of defect should be acceptable for a consumer.

I also was curious to see if the monitor rotation feature was worth anything to me. Sadly I find it to be more trouble than it's worth. This allows you to turn the monitor 90 degrees (clockwise in this case) so that web pages and such can benefit from a "portrait" display instead of the standard "landscape" orientation. In portrait mode the display is much more paper-like and web pages look great that way as do documents in Word and other standard Windows applications. However, to rotate the monitor, first you'll likely need to raise the monitor up as the average height for landscape display isn't high enough to turn the monitor without hitting the desk. Second, the cables have settled as to now provide any slack so that you end up having to pull hard against them to get the monitor turned. Third, the rotation isn't automatic. You need to tell Windows you turned the monitor. If you can't recall the hot-key that is used to tell it that you turned the monitor (CTRL-SHIFT-9 for Portrait mode) then you'll have a fun time trying to work the mouse to point to the desired menu setting using the included Portrait Pro software. This was a neat feature that, in the end, I don't think I'll use ever again.

I was also sorry to find that there is no USB hub on this monitor as can be found on many other competing brands. I personally don't need USB connectors on my monitor but several of my friends and family put such connections to heavy use and would be limited without them.

The biggest annoyance I have with the monitor is its continual insistence on alerting me to it being set for "Digital" mode when a game changes a resolution or refreshes the current one. A blue pop-up message (from the monitor, not from Windows) displays whenever this happens and for gamers it happens often. There is no way to turn that message off. Thankfully, another message that tells you that you're not running in the native, optimal resolution can be disabled.

The various features for the monitor are accessed and changed via an on screen display (OSD). The OSD is brought up by hitting the left-most button on the lower front trim of the monitor. It includes settings to adjust the image, set contrast and brightness, select the input type, adjust the color, provide monitor information , change various setup parameters (like the default language and OSD positioning, etc.) and a memory recall function. The buttons are all black on a black trim and can be nearly impossible to distinguish from one another so a little trial and error comes with the territory but they're still fairly easy to use.

I didn't like that Contrast and Brightness do not include values for their settings. Instead you move a marker along a bar with several marks along it. Thus returning to a previous setting is not always as easy as it could be if values were used.

As far as the picture it presents, so far I'm impressed. Colors appear to be highly accurate and quite vivid. Images tend to jump out at you with all their detail especially when you're not moving. Viewing the image from the side is not a problem though clearly a direct front view is best. Text is generally clear and blacks are very black. The sharpness is not as crisp as decent CRT's but this monitor is well ahead of every other LCD monitor I've encountered with respect to sharpness.

LCD technology inherently brings along with it something known as the "screen-door effect" and that is the case here as well. In games this tends to give the effect of viewing the screen through a thin reflective coating but you get used to it quite quickly. It almost goes without notice on standard Windows screens.

Overall I'm currently finding the monitor to be a good purchase but not a flawless one. LCD panels still have a way to go to match what CRT's could provide but then again, CRT's have been around for decades so LCD is well ahead of the curve on this issue.