I use this monitor at work and I like it very much. This black, slim, 21” flat LCD monitor by a Japanese company called Eizo, has a lot of features to offer:
1) Compact and sturdy design. It doesn’t feel wobbly like some of the cheaper models on the market.
Before this Eizo monitor, I was using an IBM, standard (not LCD) screen before, and this always gave me huge strains on my eyes. A few years ago when we had these 17” IBM monitors (sorry, I don’t remember the model number), my colleague and I couldn’t believe that within 5 minutes, we were both complaining about how sore our eyes had become. We had to order an anti-glarescreens on the same day. With Eizo FlexScan L985EX, you can easily adjust the brighness of the screen, and so much more.
So when my company decided to to upgrade all the monitors in the company
to LCD models, I was quite happy. I didn’t like working with my eye-irritant monitor, and also this was huge. The 17” monitor took a lot of space on your small desk.
When my new 21” Eizo monitor was delivered, I was impressed with how much larger the actual screen was compared with my old one – yet the monitor needed so much less space on my desk.
The monitor has 40 degrees tilt, 70 degrees swivel as well as 82 mm height adjustment, so it’s good for both short and tall people!
2) high (1600 x1200) resolution, so graphics as well as small fonts appear very sharp and crisp. Certain tasks such as looking at a huge spreadsheet with lots of numbers, or going through inbox were so much easier with this new monitor. It is partly to do with the fact that the screen area was much larger, but more to do with the sharpness of the colours. So much kinder to the eyes!
3) Extremely customisable features As with most monitors, with this Eizo monitor, you can adjust the screen to your needs by pressing a few of the buttons you find on the screen itself.
Again, compared with my old monitor, the customisable features seemed endless. There are the usual left/right/up/down adjustment, RGB, brightness etc. (I think these are the only ones I had with my old monitor.) Eizo gives so much more – most of them I would probably never need, I think these are for professional users, such as graphics designer, those whose work may be affected by the slightest difference of the colour settings of the monitors. These professional features include:
-10-Bit Gamma Correction (this is actually very useful. I sit near a window so I adjust this gamma rate to achieve the best viewing setting. I found that by adjusting this to a lower rate, the white colour appears more yellow (cream rather than the bluish brilliant white), and with this setting my eyes are never tired.
- Colour Control – this is a little technical! From the menu on the screen you can adjust the following settings - hue, saturation (both of these can be controlled individually for the three colours RGB. Also adjustable from the menu are gain and colour temperature ( 500K increments, 4,000 - 10,000K)
The downside of this features is that the menu is somewhat difficult to navigate. But you’ll get used to it!
4) Rotatable! When you are producing a professional, DTP document on A4, you would like to work on the whole page view, naturally. With this Eizo monitor, you can rotate the screen to 90 degrees angle, so you can have your screen on portrait view. You can’t imangine how useful this feature is until you actually try it. When you are working on a document, you are either constantly scrolling up and down the screen, or you reduce the document size % so you are working with tiny fonts – another eye-straining factor. Say bye to all that with L985EX!
The monitor has USB connection and it is plug and play (no need for a separate power supply either!). But to use this rotating feature, you must install a software called Pivot Pro. With this, you can switch and rotate by using hot key combination (Ctrl+shift+R), and the screen switches. Physical rotation of the screen is also easy – there is no hinge to unlock or anything at all. Just hold the screen and rotate!
I said in the beginning I use this monitor at work. As such, when any new equipment is installed, our IT support team is responsible, from the delivery to the installation. So I left my IT guy work on my PC and let him install this Pivot Pro. After half an hour of fiddling with my PC and Eizo website, he gave up. He asked his colleagues, who also went to Eizo website and installed various different things on my PC. I still had no rotation feature working on my PC. It was after 3 days when the IT guy came back and installed something that was missing, and finally it worked. As the monitor is plug and play, no software CD came with it apparently. So if you buy this monitor, you will probably need to download Pivot Pro (third party software).
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Overall I am very happy with the monitor. The best features are definitely the non-eye straining factor and the rotation. Comes with a 5 year guarantee!
・ Cost - about 950pounds in 2003
For those of you who are interested, I have listed the specs below. Thanks for reading!
Technical specs (from Eizo website)
・ Visible diagonal 54 cm (21.3") ・ Dot Pitch 0.270 mm x 0.270 mm ・ Resolution 1600 x 1200 ・ Viewing angles = 170 degrees ・ Max. brightness min. 250 cd ・ Max. contrast 400:1 ・ USB Port / Standard 1 upstream / Rev. 2 ・ Height adjustable 82mm ・ Additional features/software compatible with Windows (98+) only (=ScreenManager Pro for LCD). If you are a Mac user, you may need to find a third party software, check before you buy! ・ You can also connect two PCs to the monitor. Very handy in presentations.
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Not really too great with computer monitors, my dad deals with all that! Looks quite like our Dell one though! Do much prefer the flat screen ones to the old bulky box ones, Sarah x
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