Compaq P75

I built my home PC, and my particular monitor was bought from a seller at a Computer Fair. I was a newbie as far as Computer Fairs went, but had been building and bodging PCs for a good while. My monitor is proof that great things come out of computer fairs!

My monitor has been sitting happly on my desktop at home for nearly three years now, and even though it was an ex-display when I bought it: it has yet to fail me (fingers crossed).

Enough sentimentality! This 17-inch beauty (and beast) is built with a Sony Trinitron tube for Ultra-High resolution (damn good clarity) performance. I have used this monitor with both a low-end and top-end graphics card, and for gaming and DVD playback the quality is fantastic.

In addition to this, I do alot of high-quality (DVD, MPEG2) video-editing on my machine run this monitor on it. My work involves colour-correction and the clarity, colour sensitivity and accuracy are excellent.

According to the manufacturer it can pushed upto a maximum screen resolution of 1280x1024: not recommended because rather large black lines appear on the sides, which despite my tinkering I have failed to remove. It is also quoted as being able to have a flicker-free 1024x768 @ 85Hz, which I have tried and this resulted in a blank screen - a mistake quite difficult to rectify.

The monitor also includes a rather nice USB1.1 run-through for USB devices (such as keyboards and mice), which helps make for a tidier back-of-PC area.

There is also a digital on-screen configuration screen, which presents you with a blue bar and variety of options (size and position, geometry, colour, enhancement etc). This is very valuable if you want to tweak the picture to be absolutely perfect, and also contains various profiles (normal, presentation or video), depending on what you will be using your monitor for.

It is unlikely that you will be able to buy this monitor new from anywhere - since Compaq deemed to be end-of-the-line quite a while ago. If you can pick it up reconditioned (or at a computer fair), than it is more than worth the money. Big, but as solid as a rock! Great performance and value.