LabsAffordable 17in LCD monitors
The Sony SDM-S73, like the BenQ and Philips screens, has been pared down to the bare essentials. Although a lack of frills isn't a bad thing, this is the most expensive monitor in our tests. All you get for your money is a single VGA port and a set of controls that sit on the right of the screen. This monitor has no height adjust or swivel features, just a tilt mechanism. Despite this, its stand is tall, which raises the screen a comfortable 10cm above the desk. The menu controls provide no direct access to brightness and contrast or to an auto setup function - to make adjustments, you need to enter the OSD; even then, there's no auto-setup. However, Sony is unique in that it provides a Mac OS X utility that walks you through
In general use, this monitor was very good. There was a slight red cast to the display when we used the default colour setting, but this was easily ironed out using a custom colour configuration. Reading text on this monitor was a joy, as it displayed crisp, dark characters that were still clear enough to read comfortably even at smaller point sizes. This screen gave us one of the best results in our greyscale test. It showed an excellent tonal range and, while we had a few problems with vertical angle of view (brighter at the bottom than the top), we could clearly discern the 5% increments in our test pattern. Results for our colour gradient test weren't quite as good, but were on a par with most of the other screens. The Sony SDM-S73 is one of the best screens on test. Only the average colour gradient test and the fact that the cheapest price we could find for it was almost £30 more expensive than our eventual winner, kept it off the top spot.
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