The ViewSonic Gives Up
Five years, almost to the very day. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve had my ViewSonic P815 Professional Series monitor. This once very expensive piece of hardware chose this afternoon to take its last, dying breath.
It had been acting wacky for months now. The blue electron gun was malfunctioning, to the point where blue colors were rendering as green, and cool grays appeared yellowish-gold. Every so often the picture would fritz out and then come back, almost as if the unit was trying its hardest just to stay operational. This afternoon I fired up my computer, and nothing appeared on the screen. The power LED was green, indicating that signal was being received, and I could hear the click of the CRT changing resolutions. But there was no picture at all. The on-screen monitor controls failed to appear as well.
I’ve already decided that as soon as the credit card statement rolls over on the 3rd of March, I’m ordering this. It’s not the 22” variety of the same model that I was hoping for, but I just can’t afford the expense. 19” is what it’ll have to be.
In the meantime I’ve stolen the monitor from my wife’s computer—it’s a 17” Dell Trinitron that came with the Pentium Pro 200 machine I bought from them in 1995. Amazingly, this little monitor is still going strong and its picture quality is bright and accurately colored. High-contrast images ghost somewhat at higher resolutions, but then, this monitor wasn’t meant to be run at 1280×960 like it is now. It says something about ViewSonic’s quality, I think, that this significantly older—and less expensive—monitor would outlast one of their top of the line models.
On the flipside, I know a lot of gamers with the NEC/Mits I’m planning to buy, so I’m hoping for good things. Although it sucks losing the nice, powered USB hub I had on my old monitor, I didn’t really need it anyway.
Categorized as Computers