A good 19-inch display that would be quite serviceable for work and play. If you need to bring both computer display and TV into cramped quarters, it will do the job nicely.

PLUS

• Comprehensive video inputs, including HDMI
• TV tuner, speakers

MINUS

• No tilt, swivel or height adjustment
• Tends toward contrasty colours, loses detail at extremes

The ViewSonic DiamaniDuo NX1932w is really a different beast. It's aimed not at maximum screen quality, but at maximum connectivity and flexibility.

The NX1932w is designed to be a combination monitor and TV, for cramped settings such as the proverbial college dorm room. It is a monitor that includes speakers. It's also smaller than the others. Unfortunately, its wide elliptical stand omitted any sort of adjustment for height, tilt or rotation. I had to drag out my Shakespeare volume again, to raise it to eye level.

As befits its dual role, the DiamaniDuo includes an HDMI input. It also offers composite, component, S-video and RF coaxial inputs, covering the entire gamut of video standards. And, unlike most monitors, it even includes a remote. And even more welcome, a headphone jack.

Unfortunately, it was also the only one that omitted a DVI input. While the ATI HD2600 card supports HDMI output via an adapter, you'll need to supply an HDMI cable. Also, I was unable to get the monitor to operate at full 1440x900 resolution in HDMI mode, so I tested primarily using analog VGA input.

Not a big deal... I saw no particular degradation in display quality in this configuration. However, setup did involve adjusting image size and position, both things of the past with a full digital hookup.

The range of display options on the NX1932w was far more limited with the other displays. There were simple options for colour temperature: Warm, Cold and Normal. I found Normal the most natural, Warm being too warm and Cold being positively Arctic.

Even at my best settings, photos displayed on the NX1932w had quite a hard contrast, losing detail in both dark shadows and bright highlights. This was less of a problem in images that were reasonably soft to start with. In these cases, colours were saturated yet well balanced: nice to look at, even if less natural than on the more professional displays.

There's also a DCR dynamic contrast setting. This brightened the image far more than I would normally prefer, but it did produce a better tonal range, retaining more image detail in both highlights and shadows, and producing more natural colours.

DCR would probably be the way to go for viewing images, but I found it too glaring for extended Windows desktop work. Unfortunately, manual Contrast and Brightness are disabled in DCR mode, and turning it off and on requires several steps through the setup menus.

DCR also proved untenable for movies. Whenever there was a significant lighting shift in the image, quite frequent in Titanic, the monitor would visibly adjust brightness over several seconds. Once I noticed it, the effect became extremely distracting.

Ultimately, I settled on a fixed Brightness setting of 50, with Contrast still set to zero. Clearly, this was the sweet spot. Shadow detail became very good, yet whites were still not washed out. Colours were still more contrasty than on my reference display, yet surprisingly warm and natural, making the NX1932w quite a likable display.