Review: Wide-Screen Wonder

Today, constant price slashing and improvements in picture quality have made large flat-panel displays like the VX2835wm the first choice for many businesses. Larger and wider monitors can help increase user productivity by enabling them to view multiple pages at once. CRN Test Center engineers also find that the wide-screen aspect ratio is excellent for viewing videos and for working on images.

ViewSonic's 27.5-inch display is an all-in-one entertainment and productivity monitor. Engineers were particularly impressed with the quality of the unit as well as its ease of use and deployment.

As the largest of the VX product line, the VX2835wm is ideal for viewing two legal-size documents side by side. Users also can easily view more opened Microsoft Windows applications with the large wide-screen aspect ratio. Priced at $825, the VX display is a great value because users can get more viewable screen space than monitors with standard aspect ratios.

According to ViewSonic, the VX2835wm has an incredibly short gray-to-gray video response time of 3 milliseconds, which is extremely fast for LCDs. In fact, the monitor has one of the fastest video response times of all ViewSonic monitors. Just to compare it, the other monitor in the same VX line has a video response rate of 8 ms. The fast video rate makes the VX2835wm display a solid choice for animation and video rendering.

For testing, the VX2835wm display was connected to an Intel Core 2 Duo system running Windows XP. The system had 2 GB of memory and an NVIDIA 880 SLI video card. The monitor arrives with HDMI, component, composite and S-video connections. Engineers used the digital DVI connection to maximize signal throughput. Video was played using CyberLink's PowerDVD 7.

To simplify testing, engineers used some of the default settings available on ViewSonic's OnView on-screen controls, which are built right into the VX2835wm display. OnView has auto image adjustment, including a color temperature adjustment option. The factory color temperature preset for this display is 6500 Kelvin, adequate for most lighting conditions.

To check for video accuracy and performance, engineers tested the VX2835wm with animations from open-source 3-D content creation community site Blender.org and various video clips. In addition to evaluating the monitor by viewing the images and videos, engineers used Blender software and processed a rendering to see how well all the elements of an image actually came through the monitor. Engineers chose to process a complete animated rendering. The still images located at Blender.org were created using the Yafray open-source ray tracing application.

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