Spectrum 9Glrs shows crisp images at a good price
It's rare to find a monitor with convenient controls.
By Carlos A. SotoGCN StaffIt's rare to find a monitor with convenient controls.Power buttons are too often awkwardly placed, cumbersome to use or well-camouflaged. Sometimes there are multiple, poorly marked configuration buttons that keep you vacillating back and forth.But I have no complaints about the controls on the 19-inch AOC Spectrum 9Glrs from Envision Peripherals Inc. Its performance and well-designed menu and configuration buttons make it worth more than the $300 price.The controls on the Spectrum 9Glrs consist of a wheel at the center, a power button to the right and an on-screen display control button to the left.The on-screen display button activates a configuration menu. The wheel lets you navigate easily through your choices and push to make a selection. There's no control clutter.The Spectrum 9Glrs does not come with any drivers. The manual recommends visiting to download a driver. That annoyed me at first, but it was painless.Expecting to waste a lot of time hunting through long lists of drivers, I browsed the site and eventually ended up at the company's epius.com home page. Under support, I found only six choices for device drivers, one of which corresponded to my test monitor.It took less than a minute to download and about a minute to install.The Spectrum 9Glrs' power-saving feature makes it a 'green' monitor, according to the Video Electronics Standards Association's Display Power Management Signaling standard.This feature turns the monitor off after several minutes when there's no video input signal, such as an active PC screen saver. For the green monitor feature to work, the PC must be a green PC, as new computers generally are.If you're still running a version of Microsoft Windows 95 and the green feature doesn't work, you might have to activate it. The 9Glrs manual shows how.The energy-saving feature was annoying for purposes of a review, however. I would rather just activate a screen saver to save power.The Spectrum 9Glrs displayed clear, crisp images for all my test pictures at a maximum resolution of 1,600 by 1,200 pixels.Although it's nominally a 19-inch monitor, the diagonal in fact measures 18 inches.Like most large CRTs it's heavy and bulky, measuring 23.2 by 22.6 by 21.1 inches and weighing 42.9 pounds.Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, the Spectrum 9Glrs delivers better performance at a better price than most others in its class.
19-inch CRT monitor is easy to configure and well worth $300
At the controls
www.aocltd.com
Could do without
 | The 19-inch Spectrum 9Glrs CRT monitor displays crisp images and has easy-to-use controls. |
At the controls
www.aocltd.com
 | Box Score |
AOC Spectrum 19-inch CRT monitor
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Could do without
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