ViewSonic VP201s – true universality

When a new monitor arrives at our test lab, the first question that comes up regarding it is about like that:  "Is it fast, or you can work at it?” Unfortunately, that question comes from our sad reality because the form of dependence of the viewing angles and quality color rendition on the matrix’s response time is known to all users who have even come across the issue of buying a TFT monitor.

So many words have been spoken about the search for perfection and universality of LCD displays that the topic has long turned hackneyed and stopped being interesting to many. Of course, the search has always ended up in a bias to either sides, and all the words on universality once again pointed to the impossibility of attaining perfection due to the imperfection of modern technologies. But time is not still, and the progress is continuously pleasing us with novelties in many fields, so it is now turn for TFT monitors. There is the answer to the question “Is there are monitor that copes with all the tasks?, and the answer to it will be verified in today’s review, because today we are reviewing ViewSonic VP201s But we have slightly run ahead. For a start, let’s look into the table of technical specifications

As is seen from the monitor's specifications, it can't be related to any of the already established groups due to its features. ViewSonic VP201s can be both a gaming monitor due to its 16 ms response time and a professional monitor since the documented viewing angles are almost 180 degrees. The brightness and contrast are quite enough for comfortable work in a sunlit room, etc. The only factor which may restrain most users from buying this monitor is its price about $900. On the other hand, if we look back into the history of computer industry, 21" professional monitors have always cost at least 1000$ a piece, and that has never constrained their sales. But let's review it in more detail, in an order established at our resource, and as usual we start with the package bundle.

ViewSonic VP201s package bundle

ViewSonic VP201s is shipped in a big glossy box which for its dimensions resembles a box for a big printer. Just see for yourself - the box dimensions are 550x490x340. The package design is made in ViewSonic's classical vinous, black and white colors, and by its look is a product of much better quality compared to analogs by other manufacturers. Inside the box, we found the monitor itself fastened with foam plastic supports, as well as:

1. cable for plugging in a monitor via the DVI interface,
2. cable for plugging in a monitor via the D-Sub interface
3. power lead
4. CD with documentation and ICM color profiles
5. CD with the software for turning the screen by 90 degrees.
6. documentation in 12 languages, including Russian.

The package bundle is absolutely standard for monitors of such class and can be regarded as containing all the most needed items without excesses.

Exterior and design

ViewSonic monitors have always stood out with their stylish look, and the monitor being reviewed is no exception. Once you put the monitor out of the box, you immediately get the impression that it is a wide-screen monitor whose sides ratio is nonstandard. That's some mistake, and we'll discuss that while describing the image quality.

The dimensions of the external silvery frame are identical from all the four sides, which makes the monitor look quite elegant. On this frame, there are five buttons to control the on-screen menu and invoke fast functions.

The monitor pedestal is made of black plastic in the form of a bisecting foot and offers a good functionality. The pedestal allows adjusting the screen height relative to the desk within 50 to 160 mm, varying the vertical angle of the matrix slope within -15 to +30 degrees, turning the screen plane by 90 degrees to the right thus providing the portrait mode.

In the portrait mode, the variation of the vertical slope angle is also supported, but now it goes beyond the negative values. Of course, there are shortcomings. The upper part of the pedestal is a casing of the turning gear. This casing is tightly set on top and looks integral with the major part, which is misleading, and when the monitor needs to be relocated the casing is almost the best handhold point. All of a sudden, the casing may stay in your hand falling down from the fasteners, with the monitor landing on its take-off point in a quite bad way.

To have a better idea of the problem, we slightly moved the casing on the photo. The rear part of the pedestal has circular fasteners for the wires. If you unscrew the pedestal having removed the semi-round plastic from the rear wall of the monitor in advance, you now can fasten the monitor on the wall with four standard screws. Like the pedestal, the monitor's rear panel is made of black plastic and has slits for plugging in wires in the bottom part.

As can be seen, there are connectors for plugging in a computer via the DVI and D-Sub interfaces over here, as well as a USB hub for 4 devices. The power supply connector is perpendicular relative to the reference plane, which makes it difficult sometimes to get it with a power lead. Near the power connector, there is also a power-off switch.

Monitor control and its inputs

As was mentioned earlier, the monitor control is effected with five buttons on the front panel. Button "1" invokes the screen menu. The "up" and "down" buttons invoke the monitor's contrast control menu. To change the brightness level, press button "2" having entered the contrast control menu with the arrows. Button "2" switches between the monitor's video inputs which are three.

Yes, they are just three: the first one is D-Sub, the second is DVI-D (digital), and the third one is DVI-A (analogous). It remains unclear why the manufacturers divided the DVI-I interface into two parts, but what is evident is that this may confuse inexperienced users. The standard DVI connector is made up of two parts - analogous and digital. The part of the connector where the four pins are separated by a cross stands for the analogous part, and the 24 pins in three rows is the digital part. Selection between these parts is effected with the internal logics of the device where the DVI-connector is fitted, and this scheme is called the DVI-I. If only the digital part is used in the connector, the connector is called DVI-D, and only if the analogous part is used, it is called DVI-A. That is, if you use a DVI-I cable, you have a choice between these – transmit signal from the video card to the monitor with the analogous part or with the digital part. It's good that by default the digital part is selected, otherwise there would have been many puzzled users not knowing why the image quality is not improved on connection via the DVI. By the way, regarding the DVI-D: for ViewSonic VP201s, connection via this standard is simply a must, because the 1600x1200 resolution recommended for use in it is quite poorly supported by the analogous system of signal transmission (DVI-A and D-Sub).

But let's turn to describing the internal menu of the monitor. Opening it with button "1", you get access to the following features: adjustment of brightness and contrast, selection of the video input, adjustment of the color temperature (9300K, 6500K, 5400K, 5000K, UserDefine), information on the resolution and the monitor, as well as the monitor setup menu. In the setup menu, you can change the position and orientation (for the portrait mode) of the screen menu, select the language, enable the transparency of the screen menu, and adjust its automatic power-off time. If you use the analogous connection, you will get the options of automatic and manual calibration of the on-screen position.

It's rather strange that ViewSonic VP201s offers no brightness and contrast pre-set profiles as well as additional color-correction profiles typical of professional monitors. Although fast buttons for contrast adjustment slightly facilitate the process of tuning to the room illumination level, the profiles would be useful. Although the screen menu leaves a neat impression, it looks a bit simple - for example, in NEC 1770 the screen menu looks much more interesting.

Monitor interior arrangement

It's now high time we wrote about the electronic part of ViewSonic VP201s which in our view is a masterpiece of the modern technical thought. In our test lab, we've never seen more complex and modular scheme before, so we were surprised by the quality of the interior arrangement and technical architecture of the electrical part but for the matrix which will be covered later. All the boards are firmly fastened to the housing and covered with metal shields, with all the joints and connection points shielded with metal sticky foil.

The power supply unit is brought to a separate board and is under the same casing together with the main board. The PSU itself is not very complex and is made up of transformers and a few filters.

All the high-voltage transformers to apply voltage to 6 backlight lamps of the matrix are mounted on a separate board and are separated from one another, with a single transformer per each lamp. Draw attention to the fact that the lamp control board has a rather large number of small components and circuits, while usually this monitor of the module is confined to much simpler circuitry. The board is under a separate casing. The power supply and control is fed to it via a separate 7-core cable. There are three lamp connectors on each side, which is a classical scheme.

As was already mentioned, the main board is positioned under the same casing with the power supply unit and is fed with four wires. Note the fact that the board is of quite complex circuitry with a large number of components. Running ahead, we say that each input or output from this board is handled by a separate controller and is not fed directly to the main processor. For comparison, monitors built on MST9131B chip, 17" or 19" for 1280o1024 resolution offer much simpler circuitry since all the inputs and outputs in it are processed by only one chip. Let's review each component in more detail, and start first with the central processor.

The main processor is marked PW166B-20T and was produced on the 20th week of year 2004. Unfortunately, we were unable to find specifications of this processor - the only what was known is that the processor offers the BGA package and is meant for installation into professional data display units, starting with monitors up to plasma panels and projectors.

This chip is in charge of preprocessing and conversion of digital DVI signals for the main processor. Amusing is the fact that chips of this manufacturer are fitted as coding devices for DVI signals for most video cards.

This chip is in charge of operation of the analogous part and is a ADC for the RGB signal. To each color signal, a separate 8-bit ADP is assigned. The chip offers 500 MHz bandwidth and supports UXGA resolutions (1600o1200o75 Hz).

Since the main processor does only signal processing job and is not directly involved to the LVDS interface support, a block of LVDS transmitters is required for the monitor operation, which you can see on the photo.

Such a scheme of monitor provides a very good image quality, since a specialized IC is in charge of every signal type. Unfortunately, insufficient data prevented us from giving a full-fledged description of all the features of each chip, but in future we'll fix that shortcoming.

Image and matrix quality

As was already mentioned in the table of specifications, the monitor is based on a matrix of LG-Philips and marked LM201U04 (A3). Judging by the marking, the typical brightness of the panel is 250 cd/sq.m, and 200 cd/sq.m the minimum. This does not at all mean that brightness control limits in the monitor are confined to rather narrow boundaries. The brightness and contrast of the monitor vary in the same way as in many CRT displays. The contrast of the display is 400:1. Surprisingly, but that is a fact: with contrast settings, the backlight lamps can be almost switched off, with the image on screen remaining slightly visible. Brightness control also strongly affects the image which at high resolutions turns rather blurred and faded, which means its real functioning. The brightness and control are enough for the comfortable monitor operation in a well-lit room. At the minimum brightness, there were no serious artifacts found in the monitor, which sometimes occur in other monitors.

The matrix is backlit with 6 separate lamps. With that size, backlight artifacts are most visible, so some of them did make themselves felt. Also, we can ascertain that the monitor has slight darkened spots on the screen, and also a slight dark spot on the top side of the matrix.

Although the declared 175 degrees viewing angles over all the planes is true, it is subject to some peculiarities in practice. That is, the image is seen from any side even if viewed at a straight angle, but the image color rendition starts departing from the uniform if the viewing angle is changed at least by 45 degrees. Nevertheless, however amusing it is, the result is good. Most often it is hard to look at the monitor whose matrix response time is 16 ms and size over 17", because as you turn your head from either corners of the screen the image color changes even upon a straight look at the screen. On ViewSonic VP201s, even if you look straight onto the monitor screen, all the colors look absolutely uniform without evident aberrations, which is a nice surprise. So we had nothing tocomplain about the viewing angles.

By personal experience, the 16 ms response time indeed matches the declared parameters and allows playing dynamic computer games without any issues. Of course, it is still early for hardcore gamers to switch to TFT monitors, but the regular user would feel fine with such monitor at any tasks, be it watching a film or walking through a level in Half-Life 2. Judging by the parameters declared by the manufacturer, the matrix flashes the pixels faster (4in) than damps them (12ms), so there may be problems with white tails remaining on the screen, but we found no artifact like that at our tasks.

The native resolution of the matrix is 1600x1200, which evidently points to the fact that monitor does not fall within the group of wide-screen devices. The relation of the matrix sides is 4:3, which is confirmed by the physical measurement of the image area being 408x306 mm. Although the interpolation from smaller resolutions is not done smoothly, at some resolutions it is discomforting because of the image blurring, which is natural. If you use lower resolutions in games, this is less visible rather than that seen at the native 1600x1200. But if you can play at 1600x1200, the image quality is pleasant to the eye. Therefore, we arrive at a the right conclusion - the maximum resolution supported by the matrix is of the best quality and is recommended for use.

Final Words

If you are choosing a monitor for home or office and not short of funds, then ViewSonic VP201s is your choice. It copes equally well with both professional applications and games. The wide work space allows positioning greater number of controls on the desktop and gives more freedom. The size of the screen precisely matches the good old 21" CRT monitors where the visible are is always an inch smaller than the declared. The inner circuitry of ViewSonic VP201s is made at a very high quality and has nothing to complain about. The monitor turns out to be almost ideal, but TFT monitors still have a long way to go to the perfection. Anyway, we are used to some tradeoffs while assessing TFT monitors from the viewpoint of ideal quality. We say that the slight irregularity of the screen light, light blurring in the color rendition and almost complete lack of tails because of the insufficient response times for each pixel is all a trifle, because we remember a lot of problems with TFT monitors in these areas, and compared to them the ViewSonic VP201s monitor is almost an ideal monitor. If we think deeper, ViewSonic VP201s is one of the first monitors which can be treated without any compromises, and then its level in a new class is more likely to be middle or low rather than high. There are two conclusions, and both of them are simple. First - currently, ViewSonic VP201s is one of the best in class monitors because it is truly universal. Second - there are no limits to perfection. Good luck.