It's confirmed; those sweet thin TFTs are starting to shake off their bad old habits and mature enough so that gamers just might actually consider grabbing one. 16ms is the slowest response time you'll want for a gaming TFT, and the CT-722A does just that on 17 inches. This is the newer sibling to the Polyview CMV 1515 we looked at two issues back (Atomic 31), and apart from being two inches larger, the only difference is the increase in response time by one millisecond.
With its average contrast, it isn't aimed at the professional graphic designer; this stylish display is targeted at the home/office market sector.
Weighing in at a light 4.3kg, it uses an external power supply -- this is minor annoyance, as an internal one would have been less messy. Connection wise it uses the standard D-Sub, with an additional DVI input connector available on the CT-722D model.
Its standard resolution is a decent 1,280 x 1,024 -- displaying crisp, sharp colours all over. Although the colour doesn't go as deep as the amazing CMV 1515, with a few darker shades of colour dropping off as black. Of note are the borders around the screen losing colour - not noticeable unless the entire screen is one colour, but this suggests a backlight issue.
Its contrast ratio of 450:1 is lower than a few cheaper ones, but this isn't a massive issue. It only serves to decrease the 'wow' factor. At its native resolution, some crisp imagery can certainly be displayed -- it's a shame the colour depth lets it down.
In testing with the Quake 3 and UT2003 sessions, the usual blur was more noticeable, albeit only slightly, on this display because it's larger. It was still quite playable, but occasionally you might lose track of what you're aiming at when there's a heap of up-close action and you're moving faster than a Mars destined projectile that's missed and been flung out to deep space. Like a FPS game.
Which brings us to the conclusion that overall, this isn't a top TFT, but still useable. What nags at us is the price/value factor -- it's not overly cheap and full of enough goodness to rave on about it like the CMV 1515. This is obviously an entirely different bag of nuts for Polyview. Thankfully, with TFT prices constantly dropping, we'll soon be seeing decent 17in TFTs hitting stupidly low prices. Ignoring the price, for its crisp and sharp display, grab this for the office, as that's where it'll really shine.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012