Eighth Place

You would think that all of the non-DVI LCD monitors would fall at the back of the pack and be equally as bad. That’s what we would have anticipated also. To our surprise, both the Planar PL1700 and the Viewsonic VE175 stood out as being the sour lemons in our roundup.

Viewsonic VE175

ViewSonic VE175

The Viewsonic VE175 scored at the bottom of our bracket for the double-image ghosting that appeared on fine details such as text. No matter how much time we spent trying to tweak the display it was always a problem. This was also the only monitor in our roundup without a detachable video cable. Compared to the Planar PL1700, the Viewsonic was able to maintain a brighter post-calibration brightness with 0.71 cd/m2 for the black and 276.86 cd/m2 for white. Since the black levels were quite as dark, the contrast ratio ended up being 389:1 which isn’t bad. Likewise, the gaming performance of the 16 ms TN-film panel was solid. There was smearing, but for the typical gamer, it’s not a problem.

FS Reference Standard-Target

Viewsonic VE175-Measured

Compare Images Interactively!

The real problem was with colors. Selecting the 6500K preset gave a color temperature of 6440K when measuring a white patch, but had an incredibly bad 27570K color temperature when measuring a gray patch. If you look at the two skin patches, you can definitely see the problem – it’s a little too pink. So, whenever you watch a movie, everyone looks like they’re slightly sunburned. This was also the monitor with the worst backlighting with clear hotspots and the worst when it came to viewing angles. Images dropped to 25% brightness at just 150 degrees.