ViewSonic VP150M 15 TFT LCD Monitor

With a viewable screen size (15 inches) comparable to that of a 17-inch CRT monitor, the ViewSonic VP150M provides ample screen real estate while taking up precious little desk space. Measuring 15.35 x 16.69 x 9.39 inches and weighing in at a mere 15.4 pounds, this lithe flat panel can easily fit on any narrow desktop.

The VP150M's native resolution looks best at 1,024 x 768, though it supports a variety of lower resolutions and refresh rates. The contrast ratio is extremely high, as is the brightness, bringing out the color in even the most poorly lit rooms. Picture quality is immaculate and keeps up with the highest-quality DVD movies and fast-paced games. As is typical with most flat-panel displays, quality suffers when you drop the VP150M below its native resolution. Fonts become a little fuzzy and images a little stilted. Though the calibration controls correct the quality somewhat, we found the images to be slightly less than perfect.

Other than the low-resolution quality issue, there was nothing about the VP-150M that we disliked. It offers a sharp picture, excellent picture controls, and a size that'll make your CRT display seem like a bloated space hog. We think the VP-150M is an excellent flat-panel display. --Dan Simpson

Pros:

• Sharp picture quality
• Great color contrast
• Inexpensive

• Poor low-resolution quality

Installation wasn't completely smooth, since I ran into the usual so-called "plug-and-play" problems. Despite years of experience with this sort of thing, I always find that reality never quite matches either the printed instructions (in this case, half a page from the large, multi-lingual manual) or the Windows98 screen instructions. This was slightly more annoying in the case of installing a monitor, since a monitor is REALLY important, to say the least!

Nevertheless, once I rebooted a few times and tinkered around with reported-to-be-missing files, eventually I got things working. From this point on, everything seems great.

The display is BRIGHT (perhaps even too bright -- I've taken to reducing the intensity using a setting in my video card driver) and, as advertised, viewable from quite a large range of angles. The unit is reasonably attractive, and seems more-or-less mechanically solid.

I installed the included "PerfectPortrait" software; this allows me to easily rotate the screen display 90 degrees to see full-page display. "Full screen" might not be quite the story if you take into account the screen real estate taken up by your application's menu bars, etc. With Microsoft Publisher, for example, I find that I need to zoom out to the 90% setting in order to actually see the entire page. By some stroke of luck, though, this 90% setting seems to render the page almost exactly to scale.

The display seems a bit less mechanically stable in the rotated configuration; sometimes it lands at something more like 88 degrees instead of 90. But it returns to the horizontal position quite accurately, so this is OK with me.

The built-in speakers are fine for general use. I compared them with somewhat larger stand-alone speakers that had come with my Sony Vaio 526, and I decided I could live with the built-in speakers.

Anyway, I've been up and running for about two days so far, and I'm quite happy with the VP150m.