When they aren't on all monitors are just about equal. Naturally they aren't much use that way either. Proview make budget monitors, and they appeal to anyone who doesn't really need anything too exact - display wise. For the most part the sharpness of their screens is satisfactory, but not too great. Often the closer to the edge the fuzzier the picture gets.

While this would make any graphic artist go crazy, they do serve a very useful purpose. If you consider that most of the people on the internet are not surfing around on $1000 19" Sony displays with the most advanced CRT's out there then you'll realize that this little workhorses of a monitor are probably how a good chunk of the world sees the web. That being clear for the most part, but at times a little fuzzy, with sometimes poor contrast. To those graphic artists out there creating entire sites of black, and 80% grey, just consider the people looking at those kinds of pages are gonna see not to much...

Okay, getting back to the monitor. Despite its low price-point the Proview PX-772 does manage to throw in a few rather cool features. The OSD display button-knob is a rather neat and intuitive way to access the on screen controls of the monitor, and works a lot better then multiple buttons do from a users standpoint.

Interestingly the PX-772 also comes with an integrated microphone. In the past we've mainly just seen this kind of feature with Macintosh monitors, so it is rather welcome, though unexpected from such an inexpensive display.

Continuing along with the audio theme, this Proview display also has integrated audio jacks on either side. While they're not there for a couple sets of headphones - now that would be an amazing feature! - but rather for a pair of optional speakers which can be ordered separately. The speakers, if you've go them, hang off the display on either side and give you that whole home-theatre feeling.

Resolution and picture quality with this monitor are not as good as I would have hoped. Picture quality and sharpness decrease towards the edges slightly, so we have to knock a few points off the Proview's overall score for that. When resolution gets pumped up to the max value of 1024x768 this problem is most evident. Next we turned up the brightness and contrast all the way to see what impact this had on picture quality. The display fairs average in this category, and definitely better then an older Proview model which basically craps out showing the masking behind the glass and loosing a lot of picture quality. Although there are only a few colour temperatures the range is fully adequate. A temperature of about 6500K looked to be the optimal setting as it was not too warm, and not overly cold.

Colour temperature is specified in Kelvins, with 9300K representing the temperature of sunlight. The lower the number, the more blue is displayed on the screen.

The Proview PX-772 operates at a conservative number of resolution and frequency settings. However they are sufficient selections for a 17" monitor. Anything above a 1280pix would make the screen overly difficult to read.

A CRT monitor refreshes the display many times per second. The vertical frequency is the defining value as it refers to the frequency with which the display is refreshed. Hence it is called the 'Refresh Rate' and measured in Herz. Making a comparison for a moment electricity from the wall cycles at 60Hz for most of the world. If a monitor were set to this refresh rate the screen would visibly flicker. Generally a refresh rate of 75Hz or above is used to reduce noticeable flicker. What this equates to is a higher refresh rate is best, and anything around 80Hz is superb.