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Initial Impressions

The silver bezel of the BenQ is very attractive and is much like the one found on the Samsungs that we have looked at over the past couple of years. The bezel is a bit on the thicker side however. At a glance, I would say that the bezel of the FP71G+ is about twice the thickness of the Samsung 172x so it does not give the impression of being as sleek. Sometimes a thicker bezel makes it seem as if the actual display area is smaller but I would not say that is the case here.

As implied, the back of the panel is very basic; both the power and the DSUB cable are attached vertically. There is a small loop back there also for cable management. It does detach so the power cable and VGA cable can both be clipped in there along with wired input peripherals.

A large set of buttons to manipulate the display settings is centered on the bottom strip of the bezel. They do have a good tactile feel and do not come off as being spongy or ambiguous.

One of the advantages of having the single display input is that the FP71G+ goes live a lot faster than the dual input model Samsung displays which do lengthier searches for a signal. As the screen starts up, a BenQ logo flashes momentarily across the display. The out of the box settings had a very red tinge and navigating through the OSD shows that the "reddish" setting as the factory default. Other options were 'bluish', 'normal' and "user defined". I found that bluish was too blue and normal was still a bit on the red side. I ended up eyeballing the settings with the user defined and ended up with 47/ 50/50 as the settings for RGB.

Something I noticed immediately after installing the FP71G+ is how sharp it looked in when compared to the Samsung 213T. I do not know if it is simply the difference in dot pitch (0.27for the 213T compared to 0.264 for the FP71G+) but a lot more detail was immediately apparent in my current wallpaper (work safe :) )

The leather suit is perforated along the thigh and that is something I had not noticed on the 213T but the pattern on the BenQ unit jumped right out. The overall display was very pleasing, whites were very bright but they were not blooming. Firing up the word processor, text seemed exceptionally sharp and even with my bad eyesight, 8 pt fonts did not strain the eye from about a meter away.