Customer Reviews

Princeton Senergy 714 17" LCD Monitor

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

THE BACK STORY: I had bought an Apple Powerbook as my home computer about a year ago. I bought it specifically because it had the ability to use external DVI monitors without buying any extra hardware. Of course, after I bought the blasted thing I was a little strapped for cash and decided on holding off on buying a monitor until the reserves had filled back up. So this year I decided to bite the bullet, while the reserves hadn't completely replenished, I wanted just to get a LCD and slap on until I could raise enough for a really good monitor. I use an 23" Apple Studio Display at work so I knew that this monitor wouldn't be even close, I mean it's less than $300 and has DVI interface! What can you expect?

Well, I've only used the top of the line and let me tell you the only thing this monitor lacks, is user interface polish. The quality of the screen is excellent. The color is rich and vivid tending to fall to the cool side. The monitor is really bright and will not need any adjusting to lighten, if anything you may need to pull down the brightness a bit, or wear sunglasses. It may not be the right choice for color correction or sensitive image editing, but then again after you have used it a bit and get used to the gamma who knows. It has slight darkening around the edges of the screen, but is almost in-perceivable when filled with windows and really is not a big deal. The viewing angle is slightly less than an Apple 17" monitor, but is still excellent for the price. No dead pixels or ghosting on fast movements. The body is business smart, with elegant modern touches. Gun-metal Grey and black base. The base is not only adjustable, but also swivels 90 degrees effortlessly. All in all, this monitor is an unbelievable value. I would recommend it to anybody for any home or business use.

A 17" LCD monitor with a 16ms refresh rate, at less than $400 is impossible to find. One for under $250 is unheard of. I got mine yesterday, and also rushed the rebate form out (I wish I had thought of sending it certified like the other guy.
No dead/stuck pixels. Very bright and sharp. I am using the DVI input, but the monitor does have both Analog and Digital inputs.
I replaced a 19" CRT, but frankly it has almost the same screen size. The built in speakers are a joke, unless you aren't using them for music or anything that requires any sound quality. I didn't take any points off for the speakers, because with the money you save on this monitor you can afford really good speakers. I looked at the local stores before buying this one. The only one that looked better was the Sony Xtra Bright,but that one is twice the money.
The refresh time is very important for games and video. I do a lot of video editing, and even though I found some good monitors at good prices, they all had 25ms refresh rates, which I understand causes ghosting.
I've only had it a day, but call me a believer. (3 year warranty too.)

I wanted an LCD upgrade from my 17" CRT monitor. Ordered it from Amazon yesterday (free shipping) and it arrived today (unreal!). My graphics card has a DVI output, so I used the supplied dvi cable and hooked it up and was running in a couple of minutes (no special software drivers were needed in Windows XP). The picture is very bright and sharp - a significant improvement over my old monitor. Visually, it's stylish yet conservative, with a much smaller footprint (and MUCH lighter) than my old CRT. Even though my old monitor was also 17", the Princeton Senergy has a significant amount of additional usuable screen space. As far as I can tell, there are no dead or bad pixels (virtually no manufacturer promises zero bad pixels - one or two are possible and it's the luck of the draw). I have not tested or even hooked up the speaker connection, as I already have speakers I like. In order to be sure that I comply with Princeton's stingy rebate deadline, I mailed my rebate documentation at the post office via CERTIFIED MAIL. This way I can track delivery/receipt online with the USPS and prove that I met Princeton's deadline. As you can probably tell, I am very pleased with this quality monitor and with my decision to purchase it from Amazon.

I was toying with the idea of buying a 17" LCD to replace my horrific KDS 19" XFlat. I was on my 3rd monitor with the same warranty, now the color is shot! So needless to say, KDS was off my list.

I started investigating monitors a couple of weeks ago to find that many LCD's are still working with analog inputs only. I have an ancient Blue & White G3 at home that has analog out, but I also have a 12" PowerBook with DVI out. So I was not willing to buy a monitor without both connectors. That of course means you usually pay a premium. Something I did not want to do. After seeing the monitor was going to cost upwards of $400, I put my purchase on the back burner.

Well a few days ago I was minding my own business, and I was reading info on my of my favorite Apple news sites called "[...]" which has a "Latest Deals" section. It was there that I noticed a headline for the Princeton Senergy714. The price was less than $300, and offered a $75 rebate! My curiosity got the best of me, and I had to check it out. What I couldn't believe were the specs on this monitor! They were all "high-end" except for the price. I was a bit sketchy ordering a monitor without seeing it in person because I have a critical eye from being in graphics for 15 years. I've also seen so many bad monitors in the stores that I really thought seeing one in person would be wise. But the deal was too good to pass up and I pulled the trigger. I saw [...] Well my monitor arrived today and I am absolutely thrilled! I was surprised it came with every cable needed to hook up to 2 different computers, including a cable for the speakers! What I didn't know the monitor could do was be hooked up to 2 computers at the same time, and simply switch between the two with the front "input" button! I was expecting to have play around with plugs when I wanted to swap computers, but all I have to do is press one button! What a huge bonus! The colors are super vivid. The monitor is really bright. In fact it has brightness and contrast to spare. - Something I've never seen in ANY monitor. The surrounding and base are both classy (unlike several others monitors I've seen.) The onscreen menu is very basic. Not the best I've seen, but once you set it, you're good to go. The built in speakers are terrible. I have them hooked up to my G3, but I don't listen to music or play games on it. I suppose they're better than the single stock speaker on my tower. - But not much. Another nice bonus is that the monitor has both tilt and swivel. The specs say it has a 150-degree viewing angle, which is a bit below the top monitors made, but if you're sitting at a desk, even rocking back in forth in front of the monitor, you will not see any color shifting or degradation of view. The extra real estate is spectacular. I've been using a 15" iMac for 4 years, and can't wait to upgrade to something larger. I'm almost tempted to buy a Mac Mini, put this monitor on it, and call it a day. My bill would be 50% less than an iMac G5. For the price and the features, you will not find more monitor-bang for your buck. Highly recommended.

With the current pricing and rebate, this is a no-brainer. Just buy it.
Seriously, after two years with my Envision 15" flat panel monitor, I was generally happy and thought "why spend anything at all for a couple more diagonal inches". However, I read the glowing reviews and when I saw how affordable this monitor had become I decided to go for it. Just one day into ownership, I now know that it's more than just the extra inches. Any 17"er is going to have the tighter .264 dot pitch, so everything on screen is sharper and less grainy. Not all panels out there are equally focused, but I can't imagine text being any more razor sharp than on the 714. As to graphics, I enjoy shooting digital images. My pictures have never looked as bright and stunning as they are on this monitor. Speaking of brightness, for reading web pages you would want to use the four-level adjustment to crank it down a bit unless you are working in direct sunlight. I haven't hooked up the built-in speakers but I wouldn't expect them to be suitable for anything more than Windows event sounds.
I should add that I am using the DVI input, so those who use the analog input may not have results that are quite as accurate. I have not noticed any dead pixels at all. Finally, there is a full 3 year parts and labor warranty.

I just purchased one of these monitors to replace an aging Viewsonic 19" CRT and I'm extremely impressed. It had no dead pixels when I recieved it and was a snap to set up. The picture is clear and bright (so bright out of the box, I had to adjust the brightness down). My only beef with it is that the labels on the controls are very difficult to read, fortunately, I won't need to constantly adjust the monitor.

The response time is sufficient fast to eliminate ghosting on 3D shooters, and other graphics look beautiful, despite the presence of a 6-bit, rather than 8-bit LCD matrix (6-bit matrixes are becoming common on monitors that offer quick response times at fairly low prices). I can't see any evidence of dithering (the method by which it emulates 16+ million colors), and I've looked very closely at images I'm familiar with.

Although it's a 17" monitor, it has about the same amount of viewable area as my old 19". Since it's an LCD, and capable of displaying a higher resolution more clearly than a CRT, I feel like I have more viewing area now. Plus, I was able to take advantage of the $75 rebate, making this a steal!

This monitor... is just great. I honestly was not prepared for the incredible quality of this display... color is just insanely saturated (reds in particular are incredibly vivid), and the backlight is super bright, so much so that I am tempted to turn it down. As another reviewer said, there is a very slight bluish cast that I corrected with a custom color profile. No dead/stuck pixels. No ghosting. Came with all the cables. DVI at this price is unheard of, I'm so glad I found this monitor and didn't have to compromise with a (strictly) VGA one, and am able to take advantage of my PowerBook's DVI connection. Speaking of the PowerBook, this display put the PowerBook's to absolute SHAME, I was intending to use the 'Book as a secondary display, but I can't even look at it in the same glance after looking at this monitor. Anyway, again, this thing is phenomenal. Don't walk, RUN to your wallet and buy this thing, you will NOT regret it.

I've had the 714 for about 3 weeks now, and love it. I bought it to replace my gigantic 19" CRT which had done its job well, but I needed more desk space.

I started researching flat pannels around the net - looking for a 17" with 16 ms response or less with a DVI input. Not the cheapest monitors around by any means. Then I found the Princeton here. I'd never heard of Princeton before this purchase, so I did a good deal of research - mostly customer reviews. I don't really care what random sites and magazines have to say, but when people who actually use it give it such great reviews, I figure I couldn't lose.

And thus far, I haven't. This monitor has excellent color, great response time for the games I've played (Half Life 2 among them), and no dead pixels. The final kicker was the price - you won't find another monitor of this quality for this price. And with the rebate, there's really no thought required. Even without the rebate.

The only downside I've noticed is on a pure black screen, you get some light around the edges, but with a normally lit screen, you'll barely notice it.

This monitor has some positives and some negatives. However, some or all the negatives may be inherent to this class of monitor, or my rather low-end graphics card (MSI Radeon 9550 - 128).

Pros:

1. Sharp at maximum resolution.
2. Saves a lot of space on the desktop. Base is 8" square.
3. Adjustable screen height/angle. You can center it at eye-level. Swivels side-to-side as well (but why?).
4. Analog, DVI, audio and power cables are included.

Cons:

1. Anything less than maximum resolution (1280 x 1024) setting is disappointing. 800 x 600 is probably lower-limit acceptable if you don't mind large fonts and buttons, but anything in the middle resolution is headache-inducing. However, as this has "digital video input" (if you want/have) I assume it is/should be used at maximum resolution - or else what's the point? My $89 17" Proview has a better picture compared to all but the highest resolution of this monitor.

2. Screen adjustment (in digital input mode) is basically limited to the brightness of the backlight (and this is a bright monitor), choice of 3 preset or a user-adjusted color-temperature, and choice of 4 gamma selections. You can change the contrast of the R, G and B. You can also change the location of the (smallish) on-screen display.

In analog mode, there's a different set of adjustments.

3. If you scroll a page of text or images at anything faster than a snail crawl, it will be blurry. Might be totally unsuitable for some applications.

So-so's:

1. Speakers are only good for system sounds, but you don't buy a monitor for its sound, hopefully.

2. You can see the screen and even read it from way off to the side, but the apparent color-temperature, brightness and contrast starts to go down at anything more than about 30 degrees off center. Basically, you can lean from side to side and up and down, and it still looks good, though.

3. The manual is so-so but perhaps better than that of your average made-in-Thailand product. A few of the specs in the manual (250 nits, 430:1 contrast) seem to be a bit different than in the Amazon product description, but I have no way to measure, and have no complaints.

Had a somewhat scary start that worked out OK in the end. After turning off my computer and hooking the monitor up in DVI mode, then powering up, everything look fine - except the OSD which had unintelligible garbled pixels where the words should have been - it looked like a color-blindness test, actually. So, powered off and hooked up to analog. Worked fine - OSD fine. Powered off, hooked up to DVI - everything fine.

Seems to be a reasonable product with no bad pixels - and a good price with the rebate.

I bought a Princeton Senergy 714 17' LCD monitor and then Dell UltraSharp 1905FP 19' a month later. Since my computer supports dual monitor setup, so I was able to make a side-by-side comparison. Here's the result in case anyone is interested in buying:

Synergy 714 Pro:
1. Good response time with relatively small amount of ghosting. You can still tell there's a little ghosting when playing a movie, but it's good enough. In comparison, Dell's 1905FP is just so bad in ghosting that it's almost a torture to watch a movie on it.
2. Natural color representation. The tone of skin color looks perfectly natural on Synergy while it looked awful on Dell. It's almost like 1905FP doesn't have enough gradient to properly display the color transition. To use a slightly exaggerated analogy: as if 1905FP is on a 256-color scheme while Synergy is on a 65365-color scheme.
3. Very bright.

Synergy 714 Con:
1. Biggest complaint: Poor contrast ratio. The black background has a gray tone to it. So even though Synergy is very bright, I still prefer to read text on the Dell because of its high contrast ratio resulting in crispy text.
2. Small screen with the same resolution as Dell 1905FP (1280*1024). So text is harder to read. (Only matter if you spend long hours in front of the monitor reading text.)
3. Stand has limited adjustment and can't pivot. (minor)

DVI connection doesn't seem to make a big difference on either monitor.