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.