A Comprehensive Review of The Viewsonic VX2025WM

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skulkingghost

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I ordered this monitor wednesday May 31st and received it Friday the second (My graduation day from high school woot!) From newegg.

//all video and pictures temporarily removed for bandwidth reasons. sorry
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824116381
For $329 and $13 shipping.

First thing I noticed was the excellant boxing it came in. It was shipped tightly packed in foam with a clear plastic protector over the screen. I unpacked the monitor, set it up on my desk, and plugged it into my x1900xtx's Dvi port. Without any tuning the picture was already excellent!
I quickly set it to its native 1680x1050 resolution and fired up a 1080p (even though 1080 is 1900x1200) Wmvhd movie to test it out.

The first run was the dolphin video and flight video.
Excellant and vivid color reproduction was what I was soon awarded with. Video has never looked so good (especially alongside ATI's VIVO codec) Brights were bright, darks were dark, and only a minimal amount of backlight bleed (which is to be expected, and did not, nor does it bother me at all)

Next I booted up FS2004 (Flight Simulator 2004) because Im a flight addict, and it is also a good test of color reproduciton and banding. I maxed all the settings and ran the game at 1680x1050.
No ghosting whatsoever, and the cockpits and planes/airports have never looked so good! I cannot wait till FSX!

The next game on my list is Battlefield 2 (sorry ahead for the sub par pics) This game does not run natively in widescreen, so I went to widescreen gaming forum, and found a way to edit my shortcut to get the game to run in widescreen, sacrificing a bit of room at the top and bottom of the screen, and a stretched hud (not the monitors fault, blame dice for lack of widescreen support. However, the game itself was ot stretched, just the hud, and the games I played were great, ending me up 3rd and fourth in each map.

My Final game to test was Tomb Raider Legend, an equally dark, and bright game (from gloomy caaves to beautiful waterfall vistas! The game ran awesome, as it supported widescreen natively, and ran the game flawalessly at 1680x1050.

Next up came the net test, to see how hard on the eyes it was to read long posts in forums, and a general test of font clarity. The screen was excellant, no visible quality loss anywhere!
Finally I ran 3dmark 06 at 1680x1050 to see how it looks. Here is a video of the canyon flight at 1680x1050

Overall Im loving this monitor, I ran dead pixel buddy and came up with no dead pixels. I am very pleased and would encourage anybody considering a monitor to look closely at this model.
Additional pictures of the monitor can be found here:
--Skulk Out--


My Rig:
Amd fx-55
2gb Gskill 2-3-3-5 Ram
x1900xtx 512mb
Soundblaster Audigy 2
Gigabyte Nf4 Motherboard
Thermaltake cooler
8x Dvd-Rw
4x Dvd-Rw
Tycoon Fan controller
520w Ocz Powerstream Power Supply
2x120gb Wd Drives
Logitech g7 Wireless Mouse
Logitech Media Elite Keyboard (soon to be g15)
Lohitech z-640 5.1 surround sound
Viewsonic's VX2025WM 20.1 inch widescreen monitor
 
Great job, I'm glad you like it. I'm sure as heck loving mine! By the way, are you able to run Legend's 'Next Generation' mode comfotably at 1680x1050? Just curious about what hardware is needed for that. I'm having a hard time with it on my Athlon XP 3000 and GeForce 6800 GS. :p
 
havent had a problem with it and im more than 1/2 way through the game and patched to 1.2 smooth as silk, guess i got lucky :p
 
Interesting, high school senior here too, two and a half more weeks for me. :(

I'm not sure if I want to get this monitor or throw in a bit more and round out the budget at 500 and see what I can get...

Semi off topic: What's good for about 500 (let's make it 450 to make room for taxes and shipping)? Or should I just get this, because the next best thing is going to be more than 500?
 
gwai lo said:
Interesting, high school senior here too, two and a half more weeks for me. :(

I'm not sure if I want to get this monitor or throw in a bit more and round out the budget at 500 and see what I can get...

Semi off topic: What's good for about 500 (let's make it 450 to make room for taxes and shipping)? Or should I just get this, because the next best thing is going to be more than 500?
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samsung syncmaster 215tw, it is $550 but is pwns, I just bought one because frys messed up and was forced to give me $50 off (a special circumstance of them not holding the viewsonic for me twice) so snagged the samsung for $500, it is a 21" widescreen but runs 1680x1050, it rotates, swivles on the base, has component inputs, composite inputs, the works

lcd1bz.jpg
 
i don't own this monitor but if you like it buy it and use that extra money when you wanna upgrade the rest of your pc.

On another note do you have counter strike 1.6 and can you play it? i wanna see how it looks on this.
 
please do! i would love to see a video, as i'm thinking about getting this monitor. do you have cs:s, though? i would rather see that.

thanks for the review, by the way! one difference that amazes me is the bf2 loading screens.. text is no where near that clear on my crt!

all in all, it looks completely different, though.
 
I'm not able to get pics or video for you, but I have been playing CS:S a lot lately during LANs, and it's awesome on the VX2025. I can't tell you how nice it is to have a wider field of vision. Really helps with watching multiple entrances, etc. :D
 
Ok, you've almost sold me.

I'm in the middle of doing research for a new build (games hate GeForce4200's now :( ), and I've been wanting a good widescreen LCD to replace my CRT. I was planning on a new build over a year ago, which never happened, but I did research then and kept running into "too many dead pixels" or "bleeding problems" on what was generally considered to be the best windescreen at the time (some Dell, I forgot the model number now). That, and it cost a lot more than this does, which is just bonus points towards the ViewSonic in my book.

Anybody happen to know if, on average, this doesn't come with dead pixels and the backlight bleeding isn't a problem? Just want to make sure before I shell out a lot of money. Cause like I said, the last time I looked into these, the general concensus was it was luck of the draw as to if you got a beautiful monitor or one with too many dead pixels / massive bleeding.

Thanks! :D
 
In all honesty, I have yet to read about someone having a dead pixel with this particular monitor. I'm not saying it hasn't happened, but it would seem to be extremely rare. Mine has none.

There IS some backlight bleeding in the form of some light eminating from each of the corners inwards. However, whether it's actually bleeding or not remains to be seen, as when you move your head to either side, the effect all but disappears. The general concensus is that it's merely an effect of the wide monitor aspect. Be that true or not, the fact is that it is so minor that such a debate is possible. Trust me, it's no deal breaker for most.
 
I really like this moniter,but i would use mine for the xbox 360 also. I've heard this moniter does not downscale wellor does not downscale at all, this would affect the 360, right? Anyone have experiance with the vx2025 and the 360.
 
Ok, between you guys and a little more reading, I'm 100% sold. As soon as I make the orders for my new parts in a couple weeks, this'll be included.

Thanks!
icon14.gif
 
Since you are into posting video clips, could you please post a clip of the pixperan racing car ghosting test. you only need to show a small portion of the viewsonic bezel to prove it is playing on the monitor, therefore you can zoom in so we can see it more clearly. thanks


is it possible, using tabs, to display 2 websites side by side, and still be able to read it?
 
Just a heads up. Some people are bothered by the anti-glare frost layer of the viewsonic "overlaying" text.

If you check the viewsonic 2025wm thread you will find that I figured out some tweaks such as increasing the amount of light hitting the front of the screen, using truetype fonts and font tuner powertoy, adjusting the brightness and contrast so you aren't "staring into a lightbulb", and most importantly bumping up the image sharpening slider in nvidia's color correction panel from the default. This made the problem I had with the frost layer and text minimal, but its still alittle like looking through a thin film/screen sometimes.

The Acer AL2051W is apparently the same screen as the viewsonic, but uses a glare-type screen instead of the anti-glare screen. Its also about $300. Some people, like me, prefer the richness and depth of the glare screen and prefer dealing with some glare instead of the grainy anti-glare layer. Its a matter of personal preference. They are both good monitors.
 
Its a matter of personal preference. They are both good monitors.
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Indeed.

For a while, I was sure that I'd seen the 'frosted' look from the VX2025wm on something else before. I finally figured out what it was: my iPod Video! While, of course, the iPod is encased in shiny plastic, the screen itself has a very similar effect to that of the ViewSonic. Close enough, at least, that when I saw my VX2025 in action for the first time, I felt like I'd been looking at that sort of screen for a while. That would be why. :p

Just an observation I made.
 
Hey, I was wondering...could you test out a faced paced game like Q3. Or try out Wolf: Enemy Territory. I'm just curious as to how gameplay would be affected as I play Wolf. Thanks, glad you're enjoying the monitor!
 
sceevey said:
Hey, I was wondering...could you test out a faced paced game like Q3. Or try out Wolf: Enemy Territory. I'm just curious as to how gameplay would be affected as I play Wolf. Thanks, glad you're enjoying the monitor!
Click to expand...

I plan on ordering the monitor tonight. If you'll e-mail me, I'll remember to make you a video..
 
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