Monitor Troubles

For the past three years, I have enjoyed a $900 Eizo TX-C7 17" monitor, which employs aperture-grill technology. Recently I decided that I wanted an upgrade, and so I bought a $430 Cornerstone p1460 (19"), which employs shadow-mask. It got a favorable review from several reputable sites.

When I powered it on, I realized that something looked funny. I looked closely at the screen and saw that I could see the individual elements that made up the image. They are all bordered by relatively thick black lines, making it very easy to see the individual pixels. Naturally, thise is quite annoying/distracting when looking at lighter colors. It almost seems like the screen is dirty. My aperture-grill monitor did not have these. Is this simply a consequence of going with a cheaper monitor, or is there something wrong with the unit I recieved?

I wonder if perhaps the older monitor had much better resolution and filtering? If so, you might be more sensitive to the lower quality, since you are used to better for so long.

Well, I don’t know about filtering, but the old monitor ran well at 1024x768. I run the new one at 1280x768.

I dropped that monitor in a search engine & they said:
If you have a CORNERSTONE P1460 monitor, what else is there?
A video card, or video cards as the case may be these days, to get full performance from
that monitor you probably just spent a pretty penny on.

So maybe its your card?
http://www.monitorworld.com/Monitors/cornerstone/p1460.html

handy is right; you have to check your video card status, perhaps upgrade the drivers through the manufacturer’s web site. Also, check your the monitor’s driver; it may need updating.

This is on a fresh install of windows ME, using a geforce 256 with the newest drivers (fresh from nvidia’s website). I also have the newest cornerstone drivers. It is somewhat hard to explain the problem with image quality - have you ever taken a close look at an lcd panel? You can see the lines between the pixels. They are very thin, however, and so you don’t pay attention to them. On my monitor, it is much more noticeable. It is almost like I can see the individual little phosphor dots, along with the borders between them and the neighboring dots.

Oh, and handy? What did you mean by saying “If you have a CORNERSTONE P1460 monitor, what else is there?”

change to resolution rate to 1153x864
change to color depth to 32 bit
and change the refresh rate to 100 khz if the monitor will accept it

The EIZO (even though 3 years older) was a considerably higher quality monitor (one of the best made) than the Cornerstone. If you want a comparable picture in 19" unit try one of the better Sony units with a .25 stripe pitch. The pixel cluster geometry is also slightly different with a shadow mask. Some people prefer it and some don’t.
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/answerstips/jump/0,,7977,00.html

Shadow Masks
Because the electron gun moves so rapidly, a filter is used to train the beam onto the appropriate dots. Shadow masks --thin sheets of metal perforated by pinholes – are the most commonly used and least expensive filters. If you buy a shadow-masked monitor, make sure it’s an INVAR shadow mask. This type employs a special metal that resists heat over time and prevents the mask from warping, a phenomenon that distorts the mask’s ability to train the electron beam onto the appropriate phosphor dots.

Aperture Grill
Sony’s flat-screen Trinitron CRTs, among many others, use an aperture grill rather than a shadow mask as their filtering technology. An aperture grill is a set of very fine metal strips that run vertically across the screen. The spaces between the metal strips perform the same function as the pinholes in a shadow mask.

When talking about aperture grill monitors, the term “stripe pitch” might replace dot pitch, and a .25mm stripe pitch is roughly equivalent to a .27mm dot pitch. Many monitor manufacturers using aperture grills still use the term dot pitch in place of the more accurate stripe pitch.

Because an aperture grill allows more of the electron beams to pass through than a shadow mask, the display image produced by an aperture grill tends to be deeper and brighter than shadow mask-filtered images. Shadow masks, however, can achieve greater positional accuracy. Ultimately, the type of filter employed by a monitor is less important than viewable area, dot pitch and refresh rate.

1152 x 864

"Oh, and handy? What did you mean by saying “If you have a CORNERSTONE P1460 monitor,
what else is there?”

I didn’t say that, that was a quote from the URL I gave.

Dunno what else to say about your monitor. Did you look at another one in the store & see if it’s just yours? Did you call the Manf & ask them? That’s what I would do.