Top 10 Monitors

SUMMARY

Iiyama VisionMaster Pro 17 PRO: $49 price drop, great graphics, ultracrisp text, easy-to-use controls. CON: Two faint lines visible across screen. 15.9-inch viewable area, .25mm stripe pitch Diamondtron tube, up to 85-Hz refresh rate at 1024-by-768 resolution, Plug and Play ready, three-year warranty, 12-hour weekday toll-free support. Iiyama 800/394-4335 www.Iiyama.com

Aggressive pricing, a super sharp picture, and a terrific set of adjustments is the winning combination that's kept the VisionMaster Pro 17 at the top of our chart for a year now. This Best Buy monitor proves that you don't have to pay a fortune to get image quality that matches the best professional monitors. And now Iiyama has made its VisionMaster Pro 17 even more affordable, reducing its price this month by $49 to $649.

Whether you're browsing Web pages, sifting through market data, or designing a newsletter, this display is up to the task. Tiny digits in our worksheet test screen were sharp, and subtle highlights and shadows in our scanned photos were clearer than on other monitors. For instance, we displayed a picture of a shady waterway with a beam of sunlight touching a grassy bank; most displays turn the grass a fluorescent green, but the Iiyama's colors were true to life. As with all 17-inch stripe pitch monitors, two very faint horizontal lines (caused by wires used to secure the internal aperture grill) are visible against white backgrounds.

The only thing you get with our other Best Buys that the Iiyama lacks is TCO compliance. (TCO requires reducing electromagnetic field emissions beyond even the strong MPR-II standard the VisionMaster Pro 17 and most other monitors today adhere to.) The Iiyama has a full suite of 19 advanced on-screen controls, including trapezoid, pincushion, and image tilt--and they're all accessible through three simple buttons just beneath the screen. When you activate a menu item, up pops a gauge that indicates its adjustment level. One quibble: Iiyama could have made this feature even better by adding numbers next to the gauge so settings are easier to remember.