Viewsonic VA912B

I needed a decent quality large monitor for doing electronic design work, and found the VA912b on special locally. As usual, I read as many online reviews as I could find before I decided to buy one. Most were very positive, though a few claimed that the control buttons are 'flimsy', and there were regular mentions of dead pixels.

Once I got it unpacked, installed the drivers from the supplied CD and connected it to the video card DVI output, I was nearly blown out of the room by the crisp brilliant images it was displaying. What a change from my ageing Viewsonic E70 CRT monitor!

I spent a lot of time looking at photos from my digital cameras, seeing just how much detail is really in them and how sharp and colourful they truly are. The VA912b has a ton of brightness in reserve.

As an electronics technician, I can't see anything wrong with the control buttons. They're very small but not 'flimsy'. The setup menu is pretty easy to work out and use.

I haven't tried feeding it with normal analog video signals. Most reviews say the images in this mode are pretty mediocre. I tested it on a couple of small movies I've made, and found that there was very little of the 'smearing' which LCD monitors are renowned for.

I immediately noticed one black pixel towards the middle right-hand side of the image, but it wasn't very visible most of the time. Some time later I noticed a faint horizontal mark inside the glass, near the top left corner. It can only be seen on a bright plain background like a text page and is only slightly annoying.

Overall this is one great LCD monitor. The amazing image quality and brightness more than make up for the very slight imperfections. Viewsonic gives a 3 year warranty which includes the light source, to give peace of mind for a long time to come.