Cornea Systems C1704

WHAT'S HOT: If you spend the day looking at text, you'll find Cornea's CT1704 pleasant to use, and its price ($449 at press time) pleasing. Though we saw some slight inconsistencies in focus from the top of the screen to the bottom on one of our tests, they were not enough to bother us when we read documents, spreadsheets, and Web pages. In our tests, the CT1704 displayed clean, clear text.

This model's design is unfussy, with buttons that are flush with the bezel yet easy to use and clearly labeled. Like most current LCDs, this unit's power and VGA ports are mounted vertically, so you have to angle the connectors upward to plug them in. However, the CT1704 had the easiest setup of any monitor I've worked with in quite a while, largely thanks to the intelligent placement of those ports, on either side of the monitor's pedestal, which meant I didn't have to reach around or under it to insert the cords.

WHAT'S NOT: The sound from the tiny built-in speakers on the back of the monitor lacks depth and subtlety. The volume level is about average for built-in speakers, but you can't adjust the volume easily--you have to open the on-screen controls. The audio-out jack is located on the back of the monitor along with all the other connectors, a less convenient spot for headphones than the front of the monitor (but probably a preferable location if you want to connect external speakers). What's worse, when I listened to music through my headphones I heard a loud buzzing that the music couldn't drown out. (The buzzing stopped when I plugged the headphones into the PC's sound card.)

It would be nice if the brightness and contrast controls were accessible with one button push. In reality, changing either brightness or contrast in the on-screen display takes at least three button-presses. And, other than tilting back and forward, this monitor has no ergonomic adjustment features.

WHAT ELSE: A monitor calibration utility called Chromaster (included on the CD-ROM) is designed to automatically coordinate your monitor and graphics board, as well as provide preset modes for Web browsing, DVD watching, and game play. It also has Windows SRGB and Documentation modes. Though the Documentation mode was the least bright of all the presets and was therefore the easiest to look at when viewing text, I didn't care for any of them because they were too bright, so I removed the program and restored the monitor to the factory settings. Even then, the brightness was set to 100 percent, which was still too bright for me. There are two preset color modes and one user-customizable, savable color mode.

Judging from our subjective tests, the CT1704 isn't a model we'd choose for heavy photo or graphics editing, because even with the brightness turned up to its maximum we thought its images looked rather murky, and some showed too much contrast, losing detail. Our tests with gray-scale images and color scales tended to bear this out; the CT1704 didn't do well at showing differences among very light or very dark colors and grays.

The setup booklet is concise but clear and well illustrated, and the Acrobat PDF user manual included on the CD-ROM is extensive and fairly well written. However, a couple of pages in the PDF were unreadable due to an apparent problem with the encoding, and we found a few lapses in the completeness of the information. One example is the user guide's unhelpful definition of the Blending control (in the on-screen menu under Miscellaneous), which says "adjusts the Blend levels of the OSD." Blending, we discovered, adjusts the degree of opacity of the on-screen controls menu. Another example is the description of dead pixels that simply notes what a dead pixel is and seems to shift responsibility for them to the panel manufacturer, though the wording is ambiguous. Fortunately, Cornea's policy on replacing a panel with dead pixels is clearly stated in the warranty area of its Web site: The company will replace a panel that has four or more dead pixels. (We didn't notice any on our display.)

UPSHOT: The CT1704 handles the basics with aplomb, and no one could argue with its price--but if you want a good display for graphics editing or anything beyond the basics, look elsewhere.