Big flat box of fun. (Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 91)

Name: Reficul

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Product:	Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 91
Date:	05/08/00 (1409 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 19" of DiamondTron equipped fun.

Disadvantages: The screen is slightly more reflective than I had hoped - but about what I expected.

Buying a 19" flat screen monitor is not such an easy task as you probably think. You see, once you accept the fact that you are going to be spending a substantial amount of money on something relatively state of the art, it seems as if every well known brand (as well as a few you have probably never heard of) wants a piece of your hard earned cash. With a little luck, by the end of this review you will be able to make a choice nearly as informed as mine was.

Let's just make something clear. From now on, whenever I say 'flat screen', I mean flat SCREEN. I am not refering to 'flat panel' displays, which despite their slimline looks and perfect image geometry, are still massively overpriced, and I would not recommend them to anyone who is not a) rich or b) seriously obsessed with his monitors.

If you have not already read the basic description of this monitor, it's specifications are as follows: 19" (18" Viewable) display with DiamondTron NF Tube for flat screen and improved picture quality, 0.25-0.27 variable dot pitch (0.25 at the centre, 0.27 at the edges), maximum resolution of 1600x1200 at a flicker free 75Hz. You will notice the 18" viewable screen size. This is especially impressive, as most 19" monitors have a visible corner-to-corner distance of 17.5". Does the extra half-inch make all that much difference? Well, you have to see two such monitors next to eachother to see it, but it's definately there. Some 19" screens can handle higher resolutions, but to be perfectly honest anything over 1280x1023 is far too small, even on a screen of this size. I stick to a more readable 1024x768.

For the benefit of those of you who have never heard of Mitsubishi's DiamondTron NF tube, it is basically a slightly modified version of Sony's original Trinitron one - the first device to make use of aperture grille technology for that all-important flat screen and vastly superior ima
ge quality - especially in terms of colour vibrancy. The only drawback to this technology is that the shadows of the aperture grille stabilization filaments (damper wires) can be seen running horizontally across the top and bottom thirds of the screen. Personally, I don't find them at all intrusive (and I know that most owners of such monitors would agree with me), but don't panic and think that the monitor is faulty. On this particular monitor, they seem far less pronounced than on similar screens I have seen - certainly less so than on the Sony I saw next to it. To be fair, that monitor had only one visible line whereas this one has two, but personally I would prefer a pair of faint lines to a single strong one.

As monitors go, the DiamondPlus 91 is a relatively stylish unit. The picture here doesn't do it justice, it looks much better in real life. The front panel is nice and clear and relatively uncluttered. You get a comprehensive OSD (On Screen Display, for the hard of thinking) which allows you to adjust virtually every aspect of screen geometry you can think of, and probably a few more besides. I do find it slightly annoying that you can only cycle through the menus in one direction, but since you probably won't use them very much after the first few days (when you have the screen set up exactly as you want it for every display mode), so I can probably live with it. At first I found the idea of having a button specifically to activate the FPM (Fine Picture Mode) slightly quirky - why would you ever want to turn it off? Close inspection of the manual, however, reveals that there are situations where use of the FPM is not appropriate. I had, indeed, noticed that using it to play certain games results in slightly too dark a display.

Which brings me on to my next topic. Play games on a screen like this and you'll wonder how you ever lived with anything else. Get a half decent set of speakers (I recommend Samsung's subwo
ofer kit - great value at £50 for a 400 watt sound system) and the effect is complete. I would imagine that watching DVDs on it would also be a quite rewarding experience, but I don't own a DVD Drive, so I cannot really comment.

Overall, I was massively impressed by this monitor. The qualilty and stability of the image came as quite a surprise, and it's not as if my old monitor was all that shabby either. It was a Samtron 5Bi 15" FST tube (flatter and squarer than an ordinary one, but still slightly curved) with a maximum resolution of 1280x1023 (although if you think that's too small on a 19" screen, using it on a 15" one is a joke). In fact, navigating it's OSD was easier than on my new Mitsubishi's - you could move in both directions! Quite surprisingly, using it now (on one of my other computers), it's not so much the screen size that shows up, but the curvature of the image. It's something you don't really notice until you see a flat screen, but to me (and others priviledged to flat displays) you're all accessing your computers through goldfish bowls.

One word of warning. Make sure you have plenty of space. For a 19" tube, the DiamondPlus is relatively compact, but I still have to turn it to one side to make it fit on my (incredibly large) desk. This, however, might be caued by my 'Natural' keyboard, which takes up quite a substantial amount of space by itself. I just count myself lucky I didn't get that 21" model I was looking at...

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