Home > Consumer Reviews > Cornea MP704B 17" LCD Monitor

It took almost no time to set up and attach to my Dell 4100. I hit the auto button and it sized perfectly. The driver for it was odd.. I couldn't tell if the XP driver was used or the Cornea one. I downloaded the latest from their site. Still not sure what is actually getting used but it doesn't matter the monitor works fine.

Only other odd thing was an additional software package on the disk called cromaster (or such) no real documentation could tell what it was for. Kept getting error messages saying something like "not configured". I blew it away. I think it might have been a color matching software.

I'd give it a 5 star if it wasn't for the oddness of the driver and cromaster software.

My Cornea MP704 was purchased from Amazon.com for a total of $...before a $... rebate from the manufacturer, bringing the total cost down to $.... After extensive internet research and price watching over the past few months, this is the first time that I have encountered a non-refurbished 17" TFT for under $.... The monitor was delivered in perfect working condition (zero dead pixels) three business days after the purchase date.

The positives: price (obvious), quality display, and a 3-year limited warranty, that beat most of the big-name manufacturers. This warranty guarantees a unit exchange (with shipping fees) if the product is found to be faulty within the first year. In the remaining years, repair / replace will be determined by the manufacturer. Cornea also has a 3 dead-pixel minimum for replacement whereas most other brands require 10 before they'll replace the unit.

The negatives: the stand is fixed. It will tilt forward and back but isn't height-adjustable. This is a pretty minute drawback for most, but may be a problem for those using the monitor on a counter-top while standing. The biggest negative that I found is that the DISPLAY SPECS ARE INCORRECTLY LISTED by Amazon.com. I realize these specs are supplied to Amazon.com by the manufacture so I don't necessarily fault them for it, but this is something consumers need to be aware of. After reading my owners manual, Cornea lists the contrast ratio at 350:1 whereas Amazon.com states 450:1. The actual response time (35 ms) is longer than what is stated on the website (25 ms). While these discrepancies are negligible to most home consumers, they can mean quite a difference for any graphic-intensive applications.

All-in-all, the positives greatly out weight the negatives, in my opinion. This is definitely a great purchase for those seeking value.

UPDATE (1-29-03): After contacting Cornea Systems to inquire about the discrepancies in the monitor specifications, I was able to determine the following. Cornea states that Amazon.com's listing is correct. I was told that the owner's manual hasn't changed since the product's release, even though the product's technology has improved. Obviously, this is what I wanted to hear, but I have no way of verifying their claim. However, after a couple of weeks of usage, I have found the response time to be adequately sufficient to run games without delay. The backlight is also very bright, so I believe their statement to be true. This is a great product.

My office purchased eight MP704 monitors almost three years ago for use on four dual monitor workstations. We have had no dead pixels and no issues with blurry images or resolution problems. We did lament the lack of NT4 drivers, but after we upgraded to Windows 2000 this was no longer an issue.

Last week one of my monitors began to flicker, and this afternoon it died completely. As I had two identical monitors to experiment with on my own desktop, and six more readily at hand, I decided to swap the power supplies of the two and see if, perhaps, it was the power supply that had failed, and not the monitor.

Sure enough, the power supply was the culprit. A quick search of the web yielded one supplier of a replacement power supply (http://www.digital-house.com/digitalpowerproducts/ac.html), but as the price is a bit high ($60) I called Cornea directly and asked if the power supply is covered under their 3 year warranty.

In fact, it is, and they are faxing me information to send my broken one to them for replacement.

Now they may not in fact follow through on this promise, and if so I will post a follow-on review critical of that aspect of their customer support, but I thought it was only fair to report that the cause of the flicker problems reported on Amazon to date is most likely the power supply and NOT the monitor itself. And even at $60, a new power supply is still much cheaper than a new monitor.

In summary, I remain very satisfied with our Cornea MP704 purchase, and would not hesitate to buy from them again - with my own money (rather than taxpayer money) this time.

Just got mine this afternoon and I'm writing this on it right now.

First, I have to say I was disappointed - I expected better considering the very high user ranking and number of people reviewing. I'll just say is that this monitor is OK, and in particular if you're mostly going to use a word processor, spreadsheet, code editor, i.e. editing black against a white background, it should do fine by you. Games seem OK too - no ghosting that I can see, but I've only played one game briefly.

What's annoying about this monitor, and it's a big minus in my book, is the trouble it has keeping text sharp when the text is displayed against a background of similar color to the text. When you switch from one web page with black text against white (e.g. Amazon's pages) to one with black against blue (e.g. techbargains), you go from sharp to fuzzy, and you can get a headache if your eyes have to re-adjust like that all day long.

The bottom line is I don't know if I'm going to keep it. I'll try it out for a few days and see if I get used to it.

Pros -

- Easy set-up
- Light, and small desk footprint
- Looks sharp
- Price
- No dead pixels

Cons -

- Trouble keeping sharp contrast between adjacent similar colors, producing fuzzy display

I received this monitor a couple of weeks ago and have had absolutely no problems with it. I LOVE it--it's so much easier on my eyes than my CRT, and the Amazon price beat every retail outlet in my city. I don't know what these other reviews are talking about because my monitor works perfectly. And this monitor takes up so little space!

FYI: I set the brightness on 52 and the contrast ratio on 36. The screen area I set 1024 by 768 pixels.