The viewsonic E790 is an excellent monitor for its price. the technical specifications call for a 19" monitor, 18" viewable. it has a 0.26 dot pitch and the maximum resolution is 1600x1200@76MHz. be prepared to use a large font if you want to push the monitor to this resolution. the nicest feature of this monitor is that the CRT is an Invar Shadow Mask. monitors typically fall into one of two categories. their CRT (the actually meat of the monitor) is typically made out of one of two tubes. the shadow mask or the aperture grille. many monitors use the trinitron tube, which uses an aperture grille. one of the unfortunate qualities of an aperture grille is that for monitors of this size, there are 2 faint lines that run across your screen, which are most visible when you have whitespace. these are the grille lines. there is one running left to right about 1/3 of the way down from top of the monitor, and one running 1/3 of the way up from the bottom. in smaller monitors, there is only 1 grille line that is on the bottom half of the monitor. i find these lines terribly distracting and i refuse to purchase another monitor that uses an aperture grille. my sony 17" monitor is woefully sitting in a corner of my closet collecting dust for this very reason. the advantage of using a trinitron tube is that it supposedly produces more vivid colors, but the tradeoffs, for me, are not worthwhile. perhaps in a tv, where there usually isn't a lot of whitespace and you aren't staring at it for 8 hours a day, i'd opt for a trinitron-based tube, but for a monitor, no way.
i've found that the E790 produces crisp, clean images, and so long as your video card can do better than the 1600x1200@76Mhz rating, you will find yourself very happy with this monitor. the monitor can do a very stable 1280x1024@88Hz, and a rock solid 1152x870@103Hz. flicker is not apparent at the 1600x1200 resolution for me, though, which is the resolution that i prefer to run at.
the monitor does use a standard video cable to connect it from the video card to the monitor, so if you have RGB outputs, you should look elsewhere. this monitor is catered to the budget conscious who want a large monitor without the large price tag typically associated with monitors of this size. this monitor is suited for home as well as office use.
the on screen controls are intuitive and very easy to use. viewsonic has maintained their easy menu navigation and all controls are easily found and adjusted with only a few button presses.
the monitor's footprint is comparable to other 19" monitors (17.8" x 18.3" x 18.4") and fits comfortably on my desk at work.
overall the monitor is an excellent performer at the office or at home for the budget-minded. this monitor can be used for CAD as it does provide high resolutions with high refresh rates. i use it quite comfortably while developing web pages and writing code. if i were in the market for a 19" monitor, and i didn't have a lot of money to spend, but wanted a 19" monitor, this would be the monitor of choice for me.
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Advantages: Price, Quality and Reliability, Ease of Use Disadvantages: Entry level monitor with somewhat lowered resolution / functionality comparing to other Viewsonic monitors
rex73 17.07.2002 ·
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Review of ViewSonic E790
Advantages: Price, Quality and Reliability, Ease of Use Disadvantages: Entry level monitor with somewhat lowered resolution / functionality comparing to other Viewsonic monitors
rex73 17.07.2002 ·
Read review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of ViewSonic E790
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Jul 12th, 2000
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