The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful: 17" LCDs Reviewed

Introduction

The Fall season has been a busy one for TFT monitors. New players have entered the market - like the famous barebone manufacturer Shuttle and the copy-machine giant Xerox. Many new panels that had been long awaited are now available, and latency times as claimed by the manufacturers have gone below 10 ms in some cases. But even though the trend is towards improvement of monitor responsiveness, it's achieved a little too much at the expense of other characteristics like angles of vision or quality of color rendering.

Since everybody is not an inveterate gamer, we've chosen to test 8 monitors covering the entire spectrum of possible uses. You'll find out about fast monitors (12 and 16 ms), but also monitors suited to graphics and photo retouching with longer response times (25 ms and above) but with excellent color rendering, close to what CRT monitors can provide. From entry level to deluxe models, from 12 ms to 25 ms: Take your choice and follow the guide!