The most important feature of any monitor is the picture tube naturally. The Sony E400 has 19-inch display (18-inches viewable) equipped with the Sony FD Trinitron CRT. This means that you get a virtually flat screen with a tight aperture grille pitch of .24mm at the center, and .25mm towards the corners. This is really important, since my former monitor of choice was an ADI 5GT (.25AG Sony Trinitron.) The picture quality and flatness of the ADI 5GT is amazing, but the Sony E400 is actually even better (disregarding the size mismatch.) The FD Trinitron CRT eliminates the glare and reflections that are often visible on most monitors.

While some would not consider a slight hop from a 17-inch monitor to a 19-inch a considerable one, I still find the Sony E400 to be a `sizable' (pun intended) upgrade over my former mainstay, the ADI 5GT. Opening up our company wholesale cost sheet in Excel 2000 shows the true beauty of a large display, as the cells, rows, and columns are a lot more comfortable and readable. DVD's look significantly better with the 2-inch viewable upgrade, and the FD Trinitron tube does look a little bit better for DVD movies (once again less glare, etc.) Gaming is also better with a larger screen, I ([BRU]ChanHoNam) find that it's a lot easier to frag (Quake III) when your opponents appear on your screen as larger targets : )

 I was running 1024*768 with the ADI 5GT, but with the Sony E400 at the same resolution, the player models are larger and are thus easier to hit. The increased monitor size also allows for more application windows to be open simultaneously in Windows 98/2000. Having more windows open at a comfortable size is a GOOD thing.

What else is so great about the Sony E400? The Menu Mouse functions quite well as a very simple and intuitive onscreen display control device. With the FD Trinitron CRT, the E400 provides superior brightness, contrast, and sharpness over the vast majority of shadow mask CRT's.

 In each and every possible `benchmark' (visuals; brightness, contrast, sharpness) the Viewsonic looked the worst. For colors, I found that the ADI 5GT was a bit more pleasant than the rest (after mucking around with color temperature settings.) However the difference was marginal, and was probably due to the fact that I had grown accustomed to using it over many months. The Sony E400 has the best sharpness, and contrast of the three monitors. Since the ADI 5GT and Sony E400 are using Trinitron CRT's, they will always be close in terms of brightness, contrast, sharpness, and color saturation. However the Sony E400 will always win out because of the flatness of the display, and the tighter aperture grille pitch.