The Monitors
ViewSonic P95f
Though ViewSonic is undeniably successful in North America, it is not as well known in Europe. The P95f is the latest 19" flat-screen monitor in the professional range. It has a PerfectFlat tube with a pitch ranging from 0.25 to 0.27, a technology derived from the Mitsubishi DiamondTron. Here, two lines cross the screen from side to side on a light background. The screen has a coating called ARAG to reduce reflection and glare. Note that the P95f, like its peers, has a display zone of 'only' 18" and not 19". 19" is the overall measurement of the tube without the housing. It has a classic design, and only the three little parrots representing ViewSonic in the top left corner brighten up its very strict appearance. It has two types of connectors, 5 BNC plugs, and a standard 15-pin plug. Its horizontal refresh rate is stated as 117 kHz, which is very respectable. Maximum bandwidth is pretty strong at 300 MHz. It supports a maximum resolution of 1920x1440 at 77 Hz. In practice, it can reach 2048x1536 in 75 Hz, a very good performance.
In most of the resolutions tested, the geometry was nearly always fine. The screen's regularity was exemplary and few adjustments were needed when switching from one resolution to another. Furthermore, the monitor's OSD is easy to access and use. There are four buttons to browse and validate changes. There are many options available and all settings can be adjusted or corrected. There is a full range of geometry options, and purity adjustment per screen zone is also included. Moiré effects were negligible and could be tweaked into submission. By the way, only Shadow Mask monitors suffer from what is known as classic moiré. Monitors with a slotted mask are prone to what is called video moiré. The listed convergence is 0.25 mm at the center and 0.35 mm in the corners. It was not very noticeable in the tests, and a few modifications sufficed to reduce it to a minimum. There were no problems with readability and image clarity. Even with a resolution of 1920x1440, any text in the smallest font size was still readable. There was just a slight difference in image precision between the center and edges of the screen, but really very slight. Brightness and contrast were excellent and this really showed in the DVD Video playback and games where the image was always very warm and fine. Color rendering was not neglected either, even though it was not quite up to the Vision Master Pro 454 which really excels at this.
