17" LCD Part V: Four Panels Compared

Colors

Even without touching any of the controls, the basic settings were pretty satisfactory. The colors were pleasant. When studying the screen more closely, we could see that there was a slight lack of green, thus a very slight tendency for the grays to veer toward mauve, and the contrast was too strong, tending to wash out the pale colors. The basic settings thus need a little attention. The brightness did little to affect the image.

After a few attempts, performed with the screen attached through its DVI socket to a PC, we finally achieved an optimum setting with a level of contrast at around 25 / 50 (instead of 27 / 50), which meant reducing the intensity by two notches.

We left the colors at their default level - 6500 K.

85% of the colors (DeltaE < 2) were correctly displayed. 64% (DeltaE < 1) were perfect. But above all, and this was far better than average, only 15% of the darkest colors (DeltaE > 3) were poorly displayed or even impossible to see on this monitor.

The result was slightly below average, but it was good enough for playing, working and even displaying photos and doing a little retouching.

ViewSonic VP171b: Games

The VP171b was launched this summer and uses a AU Optronics panel, which is well-known to our readers because we found it on most of the panels we previously tested.