Fujitsu 17CT

Strange as it may seem, the first thing we noticed about this monitor from Fujitsu was the ease with which we were able to adjust its viewing angle. Fujitsu have put a bit of work into the base swivel unit of the 17CT which makes it quite easy to control. Ostensibly, this seems a minor point, but considering the sort of wrestling required to adjust many of the other monitors in this Labs, it was refreshing to have one that didn't require an herculean effort to shift. The 17CT features a fairly simply interface with only six buttons - a menu button, two arrow buttons (one up, one down), a plus button, a minus button and an exit button (which doubles as a degauss button) - helping to control many aspects of the monitor's image output.

The Fujitsu 17CT proved to be one of the least expensive monitors in this month's Labs, although it was still close to $100 more than the Mag CM-17J. It was also one of the lighter monitors in this Labs, weighing only 16.5kg, although one of the reasons for this was because the 17CT had the smallest viewable area of all the monitors in this Labs at only 15.7in. Fortunately, the Fujitsu 17CT shared one of the highest resolution/refresh rates (1,600 x 1,200 @ 75Hz) in this Labs along with the Acer, CTX and Hitachi monitors.

We discovered that the Fujitsu 17CT was one of the better monitors in our colour and greyscale tests, which suggests that it is capable of good tonal gradation. This would make it appropriate for use with applications that require a good deal of tonal range. In our geometry and distortion tests, the 17CT performed reasonably well although in our sharpness and resolution tests it proved to be the poorest performer. Although the Fujitsu 17CT did not do so well in our subjective tests, this seems to be not much of a problem since the scores in this section were highly stratified. In normal day-to-day usage, the monitor was fine for most applications although the 17CT has a slightly more curved screen than most of the other monitors in this lab, particularly the Trinitron-based units. Nevertheless, considering the 17CT's high resolution/refresh capabilities, which are slightly better than Sony's Quality Award winning CPD-E200, it should perform quite well in word processing and spreadsheet tasks.

The Fujitsu 17CT is not the best performer this month but
it certainly performs well enough for the price making it worthy of the Value Award this month.

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