Control buttons are centered on the lower bezel, but their black-on-black labeling makes them difficult to differentiate in anything but bright light. That said, the onscreen menus are particularly well implemented, including: Auto Image Adjust, Contrast and Brightness, Color Temperature, and Information. There's also a manual image adjustment for precisely positioning the screen image within the borders of the bezel, and Input Priority, which lets users select which input the monitor scans for a signal first. Nice, but it would be more useful if the monitor had more video inputs. Overall, the 2130's ergonomics were solid.
Viewsonic's Wizard software, which installs the monitor driver and manual, loaded without any hitches. However, the ViewSonic Perfect Suite, Viewsonic's version of the same software that Gateway licensed from Portrait Displays, crashed when searching for an update. Again, this was most likely due to FireFox being set as the default browser. Manually launching with Internet Explorer resolved the issue.
Test Results
DisplayMate tests with the 2130 were a mixed bag. While the grayscale test showed one of the smoothest gradients for a digital LCD monitor I've ever seen, there was an odd anomaly in one of the tests, indicating that there was a slight issue with the contrast: the darker grays were muted and the lighter tones brightened. This, on top of some streaking in the high contrast test, may explain the less-than-stellar text score. While text was still quite readable at smaller font sizes, it wasn't as sharp as I'd hoped. On the other hand, gamma scores were nearly perfect, and the color test results were excellent.
The Star Wars test yielded mixed results. Although not a multimedia monitor, the 2130 was able to differentiate between darker shades of gray very well, something many digital LCD monitors have trouble doing. Skin-tone rendering was very subtle, but the monitor tended to slightly redshift skin tones in certain darker scenes, and there was a bit of pixel crawl against the digital backgrounds. On the whole, however, the film looked good with excellent color. Serious Sam taxed the Viewsonic a bit less the game's cartoony colors were well rendered without over-saturation, and the monitor kept up with the action without blinking.
The 2130b was something of a rollercoaster ride to test. It wasn't the winner in any category, and there were some singular points that detracted from generally high scores. On the whole, though, it's a solid monitor. I wouldn't pick the 2130 out of the roundup for dedicated text viewing or multimedia work, but it posted very solid scores in all of the tests, making it a well-balanced performer.
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