SONY 20se: A monitor that saves on your utility bill
SONY 20se: A monitor that saves on your utility bill
By Zatni Arbi
JAKARTA (JP): If you have been reading my articles long enough, you'll know that one of my chief interests is desktop publishing. I admit that I really enjoy playing around with graphics and page layout programs, and sometimes people come and ask me to create logos for their organizations, or to design their newsletters. Now, each time I work on these kinds of projects, nothing will give me more pleasure than a 20" display monitor.
For a project that I'm currently working on, I have the chance to use a Sony Multiscan 20se. It is the biggest and the best monitor that Sony currently makes, although -- based on the arrival of Sony 15sf in September last year and the arrival of 17sf early this year -- I figure that in a few months there will be Multiscan 20sf as well.
Multiscan 20se is much more versatile than its predecessor, Multiscan HG, which was already a good monitor. As 20se has recently become available on the market here in Jakarta, I think it will be useful to describe it to you so that you will have more information to consider if you happen to be looking around for a 20" monitor. There are a couple of other high quality, name-brand 20" monitors available on the local market, such as the ones from Philips, so you should really shop around before investing in one.
Features
Like any other Sony monitor, this one also uses the vertically flat Trinitron CRT. Although it's called a 20" monitor, the diagonal dimension of the maximum viewing area is only 19.1 inches. The unit comes with a power supply cable, a video BNC cable, an adapter for Mac, a manual in Japanese and English, and an adjustment reference card that you will always want to have with you.
The aperture grill pitch is .30 mm. Keep in mind that Trinitron CRTs use an aperture grill mask, which is different from other monitors' shadow masks. Therefore, although other monitors have .28 mm dot pitch, the display is not necessarily sharper.
Connection to the PC is done through five British Naval Connections (BNC) plugs -- which consist of Red, Green, Blue, Horizontal and Vertical Syncs. If you want to connect it to computers other than PCs or Macs, you'll need special adaptors which are not included.
The front panel has buttons to control Brightness and Contrast, a button to select adjustment that you want to change, a Control button, a hidden Reset button and several LEDs. Using combinations of buttons, you can control horizontal and vertical centering, horizontal and vertical sizing, horizontal and vertical convergence, pincushion and color temperature. You can even rotate the image if it looks tilted to you.
There are nine factory preset modes, and you can specify an additional 12 user modes. The unit degausses itself each time it is turned on, eliminating magnetic build-up and correcting the screen colors. Other features include today's standard requirements such as MPR II and TOC Nutek compliance.
For your information, Sony is not the only monitor manufacturer that makes cylindrical CRTs. Mitsubishi also uses similar technology in its Diamondtron series. As a matter of fact, when you buy a monitor larger than 20", chances are the CRT is made by Hitachi, Matsushita or Mitsubishi. The fact is, although there are so many monitor brands out there, the 17" or larger CRT is made by only a handful of CRT makers, including these three, plus Sony and Toshiba. NEC makes its own CRTs.
Conservation
Sony Multiscan 20se carries an EPA Energy Star sticker on it. That means that this monitor consumes a very small amount of electricity power when the computer is inactive. The first time I switched it on, for instance, nothing came out. The green light on the power switch button went off almost immediately and the yellow one indicating Power Saving mode to its left went on. I thought something was wrong with the unit, so I disconnected the video cable and connected my old NEC 4D to the PC. Nothing showed up on the display, either. After some checking, it turned out that the PC had never booted up properly due to a fault in its I/O board. I replaced the card, and everything went smoothly afterwards. The experience shows that, if there's no signal from the video card, 20se automatically switches to its Active-off mode, which reduces power consumption to only about 7 percent.
The Energy Star is not all that you should look for in today's high-end monitors. In the last few years, most graphics accelerator boards -- including my ATI Graphics Ultra Pro and RealMagic Rave that I reviewed some time ago -- incorporate the Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS) capability. This is a feature based on a standard specified by the Video Electronic Standard Association (VESA). On the other hand, not all monitors sport this feature. Here's one thing you should always keep in mind: Never activate the graphics board's DPMS feature when using a monitor that doesn't support it, as this will permanently damage the monitor.
The older Multiscan HG is one of those monitors that doesn't support DPMS. The newer Multiscan 20se does, and let me briefly explain how it works with my Graphics Ultra Pro.
Buttons
I ran the mach-32 utility program in Windows. I clicked on the Advanced and then DPMS buttons. When the DPMS dialog box appeared, I activated the feature. I specified one minute for Standby Time, two minutes for Suspend Time, and three minutes for Off Time.
With these settings, if there is no activity in one minute, the graphics board stops sending the horizontal or vertical sync signal and the monitor will go into its Suspend mode. In this mode, it consumes only 10 percent of power compared to normal operation. After two minutes of inactivity, the board stops sending both the horizontal and vertical sync signals and the monitor will go into its Active-off mode. Unlike monitors, such as Nanao Flexscans, however, Multiscan 20se can't actually turn itself off, although the DPMS setting of the Graphics Ultra Pro has the feature.
From its Suspend mode, you'll almost immediately get the display back. However, from the Active-off mode, it will take more than 10 seconds to get back to normal operation.
Wish list
MAG, another leader in the monitor industry, started the tradition of placing an LCD display for digital readouts of horizontal and vertical frequencies on its InnoVision monitors. It was once considered a gimmick, at the very least serving solely decorative purposes. But now people are realizing the actual benefits of this display, and so more and more monitors have this LCD display. In Multiscan 20se, there's no way we can find out the parameters in effect unless we use a video utility such as DisplayMate from Sonera Technologies. So my first wish is that Sony also had put one of these LCD displays on its monitors.
Another wish is the addition of another connector port so that we could connect this monitor to two different computers. Other monitors, such as an older Nanao Flexscan that I once used in 1991, have a D connector in addition to the BNCs. With two separate connectors linked to two computers, one can easily switch -- by pressing a button on the front panel -- from one computer to another.
Another complaint concerns display geometry. The side edges of the image can be adjusted with the help of pincushion setting. However, the top and bottom edges of the image do not form two exactly parallel straight lines. There's still no trapezoidal control in Multiscan 20se, and therefore I cannot fix this. However, this type of distortion is pretty common with large- sized monitors.
Final word
When we think about it, we'll realize that the price of a 20" monitor is at least three times the price of a 20" TV set. To be honest, I don't completely believe the manufacturers' justification for such a huge difference; they always claim that the high price is caused by the fact that the computer monitor has a lot more circuitry and other electronic components than the TV set.
Regardless of whether the claim is true or not, a 20" monitor is definitely not for common use -- unless you have extremely healthy bank accounts. Therefore, it is important to look around and compare features and image quality before you make your substantial investment. In terms of display quality, Sony Multis can 20se definitely cannot compete with NEC 21XP or Nanao Flex scan F760i-W, both of which are considered the best for this class of monitors. However, with its lower price and availability in Jakarta, it may be the right choice for you.
Besides price, another thing that you should take into account is the fact that a 20" monitor takes up a lot of space on your desk. I can testify to this one, as now I have problems with a cramped work area. Finally, a monitor of this size is also heavy -- about 30 kilograms. Putting it on top of your CPU case is generally not a good idea.