Monitor Reviews

My dad bought one from Sharper Image and he asked me to set it up for him. Well, it didn't work right out of the box so we called up Sharper Image and they said their's didn't work either. It's a pretty decent idea, but I would wait for the next generation. Hopefully quality and price will make nice leaps by then.

I PURCHASED THIS MONITOR 12/21/02 AND I AM VERY UNHAPPY WITH THIS MONITOR. THE COLORS ARE GOOD, BUT THE BRIGHTNESS AND CONTRAST SETTINGS ARE VERY POOR. I HAVE A BRAND NEW P4 COMPUTER, AND WHEN SETTING THE CONTRAST/BRIGHTNESS THE SCREEN ALWAYS HAS A CLOUDY LOOK, AND IN ORDER TO GET A CLEAR SETTING THE BRIGHTNESS HAS TO BE SET AT 50%, BUT THEN THE SETTING IS TO DARK. ANY BRIGHTER AND YOU WILL SEE MORE OF A CLOUD THAN ANYTHING ELSE, IN A DARK ROOM IT'S FAIR, TURN ON THE LIGHTS IN YOUR DEN OR OFFICE, AND IT'S ALL OVER, YOU WILL BE VERY UNHAPPY WITH THE SCREEN QUALITY . SAVE YOUR MONEY AND PAY A LITTLE EXTRA FOR A GOOD MONITOR. SONY REALLY MADE A BOO BOO BY PLACING IT'S NAME ON THIS PRODUCT!

It looks sleek and isn't as deep as 21" monitors used to be...but poor convergence, fuzzy text and quality problems plague this monitor. If you read lots of the online reviews for the e540 you will find the most common complaint to be the convergence of the monitor. If you set all the red green and blue phosphors to be perfectly aligned in the center of the screen they were horribly misaligned on the corners, particularly on the left side. The result was text that was clear in the center of the screen but very blurry towards the left. Aiding to the problem was that there were 3 vertical convergence controls (top, middle, and bottom) but only 1 horizontal. It seems as if Sony purposely crippled the controls on the lower end monitor so you would be forced for a reason to buy their more expensive line.

About a week into getting the monitor it also started experiencing shaking problems that made it useless. Although it was infrequent, the problem did reappear every few days - even on a different computer (so I rule out a video card problem).

Another negative was the very thin video cable that I think would be prone to interference. Sony took far too many shortcuts on this model. Stay away.

This one is a monitor that has an added tv tuner. It's not a native LCD TV.

I bought this cable to connect my laptop to a 21" screen. The video signal quality is really bad, and my eyes hurt after 10 min. I work with it. The same laptop, the same screen, and an old cable I borrowed from a colleague of mine work perfectly.

Most reviews I see read seem like they are written by some professional marketing agent trying to persuade me that they are an average "Joe" writing to extol the virtues of some product. Let me assure you, I am no professional....and I certainly cannot extol the virtues of this monitor. Right out of the box, this monitor had problems. Extreme bowing at both the top and bottom of the picture were more than I could stand. I fiddled with the controls for over an hour trying to eliminate the bowing, but to no avail. On top of that, the CD-ROM included with the monitor caused my PIII HP all kinds of problems. I finally removed the CD software and let the plug & play routine do its thing. That procedure stopped the freezing and quirky mouse problems, but the bowing remains. This one is going back....tomorrow!!!

this is NOT worth the price it lags and sucks jugz