Home > Consumer Reviews > ViewSonic G90F 19" PerfectFlat CRT Monitor

As the specs on this can easily be viewed in the technical data, I thought I would review this moniter from the user perspective. First of all, its really, really BIG. The thing is heavy as well.
So once you get this monster planted and plugged in, the fun begins. A minor peeve of mine is the "19 inch" description of this moniter, however. Its actual viewable area is more like 18", but thats par for the industry - where a "80gig" Hard Drive is really only 74gigs and so on. If you are upgrading from a 15" or a 17" however it will look just gigantic, and that extra inch or so is not going to be missed.
The install disk comes with drivers and a color template for matching with a printer. My moniter came with all needed cords as well, so I did not have to buy anything else.
Now depending on what you like the settings on this moniter are configurable in about a hundred different ways - more actually. It is, of course, expandable up and down, side to side, and in a lot of other ways when you are adjusting the way the window where the software runs on the inside of the screen. It is adjustable up to 1600x1200 at 77hrtz as well, (this means it can get really, really crisp and clear, with *tiny* icons, etc (which you can then enlarge with the OS, of course) or a more reasonable 1024x768 at 90hrtz. This means that the screen has 1024 lines of resolution running horizontally, and 768 vertically, and it is rewritten... often. I understand that you dont want the 'hertz' to be below 60, which can cause eye strain at that low a number. Something about how frequently the picture is re-written (many many times a second - I think 60Hrtz is 60 times a second, but I am not 100% certain). Nevertheless you will not have the issue of eye strain with this thing, it cycles very rapidly, on average my settings on it for gaming or photoshop / digital image adjustment is 1280x1024 at 88hrtz, and for poking around on the internet reading email and browsing I use 1024x768 at 88hrts. The result is incredibly clear fonts, crisp color, clean lines and amazing gaming.
The moniter is a "G90f" the G is for "graphics" it is sold as a pretty high end Viewsonic, and features some built in glare resistance in the glass, and shadowmasking for incredibly clear and distortion free viewing.
I have had a top of the line NEC moniter, 17" which cost over $600 new, and a HP LCD moniter (HP Pavilion F1703) and while the HP is smoking I prefer this Viewsonic for gaming and all around great images. A few bonuses I can think of off the bat are the 3 year warranty on parts and labor (try to get that from Sony) and the glare resistant coating on the glass, which means you dont need to worry about eye strain or buying one of those $50 plastic glare resistant plates to hang in front of the moniter.
I bought mine in summer of 2003 for $399.00 This was a great deal in my opinion. I have seen it here at Amazon for less, and if you are considering buying a 19" Flat Screen CRT Moniter, I honestly do not think you can do any better than this item.
I hope you enjoy it, and that my non-technical description helped.
Jim "Gileas" B.

Guys (and girls), to get rid of the fuzzy text, simply use the front panel controls on the monitor to bring the brightness down to about 1/3 and increase the contrast to maximum. And make sure you're using 9300K in the viewmatch color menu. That will get rid of the fuzzy text and it will make whites appear white. It will also reduce the visible change in brightness of the desktop that is apparent (with the default settings) when you switch between open windows that are not maximized.

I had an old G771 (17") that had a short in it and I finally needed to replace it. It was a great monitor, so I thought I'd get another Viewsonic graphics monitor. Seemed like a no brainer to me.

The first G90f I received (not from Amazon, by the way) had terribly blurry text. The letters had kind of a white ghosting next to them. No monitor adjustments would solve the problem. This made reading a really fatiqueing experience. I contacted Viewsonic and they had no problem replacing the monitor with another, which was great. (so, kudos for customer service) I have just received the replacement and it's better, but still the text is just not as sharp as I'm used to. Luckily I use this for web design and not reading a lot of text, so it will probably be okay.

On the bright side, the color is bright and nice and the larger monitor (19") with all that extra real estate makes working with graphics programs like Photoshop, really nice.

So, anyway, maybe I just got two bum monitors or maybe I'm too picky. The other people seemed thrilled, but I wanted to let people know about this potential problem.

When my Viewsonic A90f was damaged during an electrical storm, I decided to replace it with the G90f because I had heard such great things about it- but I soon found out that the G90f has some serious problems that no one should need to put up with.
The colors are far better than many CRTs I've used, but that's where the virtues end. At any reolution above 800x600, everything becomes fuzzy and black objects like type tend to have a white glow on them. None of the settings will fix this.

Also, ignore the flat screen selling point. As with most shadow mask CRTs, this one has a flat glass surface with a curved inner tube and distortions are unavoidable at high resolutions.

I'd just like to second the fuzzy text argument. I bought this monitor with high expectations due to the nice reviews that it got across the internet however using this on any resolution higher than 1152x is just disgusting and not just visually displeasing, it hurts your eyes to look at it for very long.