17" LCD Part II: The Heavyweights Enter The Ring

NEC MultiSync LCD1700V

NEC has changed its previous tactics. Only last year, they were saying they were offering top-range products at above-average prices. They got over that and now are announcing price drops of 3% to 36% for their entire range of 15" to 20" LCDs. And this when the general trend is toward price stabilization.

The LCD1700V is one of the monitors with a price drop. It is of fairly classic design, the only novel feature being that it comes in two colors - black and white. The OSD menu is more original. Not only does it have the usual settings for phase, time and color temperature (best as usual at 6500K), it also has advanced settings for the image called saturation, shade and natural tones. These adjustments are very sensitive and the images easily veer to too much or too little saturation.

When properly adjusted, its color range is as follows:

There are a lot of colors, and they come through pretty well in games, a bit better than average, even though the shades are a bit short on sharpness. This is equally true in office applications such as word processing and spreadsheets, where the background "white" is not really white.