It's been 12 years since I got my first PC. Back then, it came with a 14" 800x600 CRT monitor. But times change. Now, for just $250 you can get a 22" LCD monitor with a 1680x1050 resolution! Geeks.com were very kind to send us one of their LCD monitors, the Viewsonic VX2235wm, for a review. We tested the monitor under Windows, Linux and the Mac and here is what we found.
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Member since:2005-06-28
On Windows, I downloaded the latest driver version for this monitor from Viewsonic website and installed it. After it was done, the default monitor profile was changed by the driver, and it's now using the Viewsonic-recommended one. The only adjustments I had to make *before* I installed the driver was to just "auto calibrate" and this fixed the screen that was a tiny bit off (the colors were as accurate though). The monitor is at 6500k btw.
Member since:2005-11-05
On Windows, I downloaded the latest driver version for this monitor from Viewsonic website and installed it. After it was done, the default monitor profile was changed by the driver, and it's now using the Viewsonic-recommended one. The only adjustments I had to make *before* I installed the driver was to just "auto calibrate" and this fixed the screen that was a tiny bit off (the colors were as accurate though). The monitor is at 6500k btw.
Ah nice, so with this brand a lot is done for you. If only that were true of all of them.
Member since:
2005-11-05
Eugenia, thanks for this. Did you do anything by way of color calibration? Did the monitor come with icc profiles and did you import them into Windows and set one up as default? Did you set up and adjust a gamma program at all? Do you know what color space and temperature you're running at? Does the Viewsonic come with own-brand software that does all this and if so what's it like?
These are just questions out of interest and in no way critical. I recently got a Belinea monitor. It's very nice indeed, after it's been calibrated. But out of the box, it was glaringly bright and the colors were way off. Turning the contrast down, as you did with the VX2235wm, helped with the glare but didn't do much for the colors.
I have a feeling that many monitor makers are just knocking the stuff out these days, with the result that users suffer a degraded experience unless they take some time to set their monitor up properly. Of course, this may not apply to Viewsonic which is a premium brand I'd imagine.
Hmmn, the makings of an OSNews articlelet begin to stir. A couple of utilities mean it's even quite easy to do this on Linux these days, which at one time it certainly wasn't.