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21-inch LCD Monitors: Page 8 of 12

The 214T sports a sleek silver design. Although you can't adjust the monitor's height more than four inches, the neck is high enough so that you can rotate the monitor easily. The square cutout monitor stand isn't obtrusive, and it's rock stable. The neck tension is slightly on the stiff side, but most adjustments can easily be done with one hand.

A selection of six control buttons adorns the lower right-hand side of the bezel: PIP, auto tune for analog connections, video source select, brightness, and pre-selected settings. Of course, the buttons take on different functions for menu navigation. Aside from the usual digital and analog video inputs, the 214T has one S-video and one composite video input for multimedia. The only thing missing are USB ports.

The software auto installation ran into a hiccup when it tried to open an HTML file that couldn't be located, but after I manually opened the file from the disc, it launched a nicely integrated page that displayed drivers and software for various OSes, troubleshooting, setup, specs, and a PDF manual. Unfortunately, auto-install isn't supported from browsers other than Explorer, but a quick switch from Firefox, and I was on my way.

The 214T comes bundled with Natural Color 2.0 to synch monitor and printer settings for accurate print jobs, Portrait Display's excellent MagicTune to tweak calibration, and Magic Rotation to deal with rotating the screen image to portrait mode. Unfortunately, there's no auto setting for rotation, so you'll need to activate it before you flip the screen, but it's easily done with a desktop icon or customizable hotkey. Composite video and S-video inputs let you hook up external video devices and view them either by switching the entire display input, or through the PIP (which is adjustable for size and location, but not as customizable as the Gateway).

Test Results
The monitor's image quality was excellent. The grayscale test was the smoothest of the bunch — there was only a slight light/dark shift, similar to the Viewsonic's but not as harsh. There was more ghosting and streaking in the high contrast test than in the other monitors, but the text score, which shows how the screen handles static contrast, was the best of the roundup. There were only two other glitches in the otherwise superlative scores: green (generally the most sensitive color) was a bit more washed-out than other colors in the low saturation test, and the static gamma was slightly off. However, both of these issues were well within normal operating range of LCDs.