Tatung C7B

Many PC owners are still squinting at their 14 or 15 inch monitor, trying to decipher blurry text and generally putting up with poor quality for the sake of spending a couple of hundred pounds on a replacement unit. Let's face it, every time you use your PC, you look at the monitor all the time, so it's important to have a high-quality model that does the job properly. Often you will find that there is a big price difference between the same size monitors, and this is usually down to differences in quality and features.

Tatung's new C7B falls at the lower end of the scale, aimed at people on a budget who want to buy a bigger monitor than their current one. It doesn't have many features to shout about, but it does have an on-screen display. This was quite frustrating to use as you cannot cycle back through the options if you miss the option you want. The actualy adjustments you can make are limted to colour, geometry and size/position. We were disapointed to find no moire reduction control, since our testing revealed a fair amount of it. Unfortunately the top resolution of 1280 x 1024 is only provided at a refresh rate of 60Hz, which is less than usable due to the clearly visible flickering that this causes. The recommended resolution is 1024 x 768 @ 85Hz, which should be enough for most Windows applications. There is no anti-relection or anti-glare coating on the screen, and not a USB hub in sight.

As usual we ran our tough obstacle course of tests on the C7B to see how it would fare. The first thing we noticed, and the big failing point of the monitor, was the extremely reflective screen. Every small detail of your surroundings is clearly visible on the display, which is distracting at best and downright annoying the rest of the time.

Geometry was one area where the C7B shined, with the edges of the image being straight and parallel. Focus wasn't too bad, but around the edges and in the corners it was noticeably worse. Colours were not the best we've seen, but the horizontal and vertical convergence was actually quite good. This means that images with fine lines in them will not look as if edges don't meet up. Overall, the tests resulted in the C7B attaining a score of just over 70 per cent, which isn't too bad.