I'll admit to admiring the smooth, retro styling and dynamic precision of BMW's Z3 roadster, but there are times when you need the ground-pounding, window-rattling, no-holds-barred performance of a Shelby Cobra. That's how I feel about CTX's http://www.ctxintl.com Ultra Screen PR1400F 21-inch monitor. While I love the svelte, space-saving LCD panels, this 21-inch (19.8-inch diagonal) CRT is both the biggest and best monitor I've ever tested.
All monitors are not the same. Some inexpensive models are better suited to working with office-suite software, but CTX's Ultra Screen PR1400F monitor is perfect for graphics applications where sharpness and accurate color are important. The monitor has a .24 dot pitch, but since the CTX Ultra Screen PR1400F uses a Trinitron cathode-ray tube, which has vertical stripes instead of dots, the ratings are similar to conventional monitors, but they're not exactly the same.
One of the easiest ways to spot a Trinitron tube is the two thin, soft gray horizontal lines that appear about one third from the top and one third from the bottom of the screen. These
are shadows of wire supports holding the aperture grille--instead of a conventional monitor's shadow mask--in place. It took me only a short while to see the top line, but I didn't see the bottom one until using the CTX Ultra Screen for more than a week; that's how negligible these shadows really are.
The monitor has a built-in USB hub with one upstream connection (coming from the computer) and two downstream (out to peripherals) jacks, which are useful for all of the devices that end up being connected to your computer.
When evaluating monitors, image quality really counts. Having a large, high-quality monitor enhanced my ability to manipulate photographs with Adobe Photoshop and create desktop publishing projects with Adobe PageMaker. With this monitor, you can, for example, view two full letter-sized pages at the same time. The monitor works with either Mac OS (up to 1,152-by-870 pixels) or Windows (up to 2,048-by-1,536) computers.
Not only are graphics applications best viewed on a Shelby-like CRT like CTX's Ultra Screen PR1400F, but even something seemingly mundane like Web surfing is a better experience, especially with Microsoft's (and I never thought I'd say this in print) Internet Explorer 5 Macintosh Edition.
The monitor has on-screen controls for adjusting geometry, sizes, color, and all of the kinds of settings you expect in a quality monitor. As with every other monitor I ever tested with a Macintosh, after I fill up the screen area using the screen adjustment controls, it always shrinks by a few pixels on the top, bottom, and side. This appears to be a Macintosh quirk, not a CTX problem, because it's happened with every CRT monitor I've tried with every Mac I've had, including my current Power Macintosh G3 and previous Mac OS computers.
At $999, the retail price of the Ultra Screen PR1400F isn't cheap, until you realize it's the same price you would pay for a 15-inch LCD flat-panel display. When I connected it to my G3, it was love at first sight.
