A year or two ago I used to have a ViewSonic E70 17” monitor that I got from my sisters work when they were getting rid of it.

I got it because it was a ViewSonic and at that time I only had a 15” monitor that was getting ready to kick the bucket. I have no idea how much my sisters company paid for this but I can only guess it would have been anywhere from $150 to $250 (maybe even more) back then. I checked the price right now and the cheapest is $120. I had used this monitor for almost a year until I replaced that with one that I bought from craigslist.com for $30; it is a NEC 19” (this NEC is so old that I cannot find it anywhere so I cannot write a review on it) but not as good in picture quality as the ViewSonic.


DESIGN :
First of all the specifications say it is a 17 inch monitor, but actually as most people know that the viewable size is always different. The viewable area for this monitor is about 16 inches, which is really good and plus it has a maximum resolution of 1280x1024 at about 66Hz. This particular unit is beige in color which did not match well with the mouse, keyboard, phone and the desk itself.

There are a total of 5 buttons on the front panel: power, 1, 2, up, and down. These buttons allow you to set the brightness, contrast, size, position, color, and other useful settings. To get to these settings just press the 1 button once and the settings menu appears right away. Use the arrows to select the setting you want to change and press the 2 button. To actually make changes to the selected setting, you also use the up and down buttons. I personally think it is not an efficient design by ViewSonic; it would have been better to have a jog dial instead to save space on the front panel, make it look better, and also provide faster navigation through the settings.