Mitsubishi Diamond Scan 14. (Evaluation)
by Tom Benford

Mitsubishi's monitors have grown more attractive over the years, both in physical styling and technical advancement. The Diamond Scan 14 is a representative example of this continuing form-and-function evolution.

While the monitor makes a good viewing choice for the intermediate user, it also offers the superhigh resolutions often required by power users. The 14-inch monitor uses Mitsubishi's Diamond Scan screen-matrix technology to produce excellent color rendition and screen contrast, and it's mounted atop a removable tilt-swivel base that makes it easy to adjust the screen for the best viewing position and angle.

You'll find the power switch conveniently located at the lower right corner of the screen and all of the viewing adjustment controls nestled comfortably under the video display. The usual complement of knobs to control horizontal size, horizontal position, vertical size, and vertical position are all located right up front for easy access.

The system I used with the Diamond Scan 14 was an i486-based PC running at 33 MHz with a 1MB Truevision Video VGA with Overlay board. The Truevision board is a high-end Super VGA card capable of the 1280 x 768 256-color mode as well as support for NTSC recordable video and overlay.

The Diamond Scan 14 had no problems running my Windows 3.0 applications with this hardware configuration in 1024 x 768 256-color mode, 800 x 600 mode, or other modes. Image clarity was very good, as was the color saturation and separation.

Moire patterns were quite evident anytime a close grouping of vertical lines appeared on the screen, and this condition also affected the corner resolution on some images as well. The moire patterns were particularly noticeable and visually annoying with fine dot patterns, as in the borders of many Windows applications such as Microsoft Works or Word. Screen flicker, otherwise unnoticeable, made these gray-border areas "strobe," which is a major cause of eye fatigue.

The Mitsubishi monitor also showed some image persistence with fast-moving, high-contrast graphics. Simply described, when a light-colored object moved quickly across a dark background (as in moving the mouse pointer), a slight ghost image, something like a short tail on a comet, followed the object.

Quickly switching from text to graphics mode and vice versa caused a noticeable screen bounce, especially when switching from one view to another inside an application. With DOS applications such as Microsoft Works, this screen bounce was quite pronounced when switching a spreadsheet view from the worksheet to a bar graph representation of the same information in another window. Since everything runs under graphics mode in Windows, however, screen bounce wasn't a problem there.

If you're in the market for a good-looking Super VGA monitor capable of running in the extended video modes, take a look at the Mitsubishi Diamond Scan 14. Circle Reader Service Number 308