Cornerstone p2450

Mild-mannered monitor
The Cornerstone p2450 is your standard putty-colored monitor on the outside, with a flat aperture-grille tube on the inside that yields a low-glare, perfectly flat screen. The included documentation is more thorough in some ways than in others. The user guide, on CD-ROM, includes setup and safety instructions, in addition to a detailed explanation of the multiple onscreen display (OSD) menus and their corresponding controls. An entire page is even devoted to contact information for customer support. However, there are no troubleshooting tips or definitions of the various controls to help novices understand what they're adjusting (for example, what exactly is "convergence"?).

The Cornerstone p2450's OSD menu is one of the more complex--and comprehensive--that we've seen. Four submenus contain everything from basic adjustments (such as contrast, pincushion, and rotation) to more complex ones (such as hooking, focus, and settings that move the OSD around the screen). Navigating the multitude of menus is easy: Press one button on the front panel of the monitor to call up the OSD, and use the dial under the panel to scroll. The dial doubles as the brightness control when the OSD is inactive. The only annoyance to navigating the p2450's OSD is that you must scroll through all the items on each menu to get to the next.

Easy on the eyes
The p2450 is capable of a high 1,600x1,200 maximum resolution with a decent 75Hz refresh rate and a fine .25mm dot pitch that most eyes will be able to tolerate. At this resolution, though, the fonts and icons on the desktop are really too small to read. Most users will find that setting the display to 1,280x1,024 with a high 85Hz refresh rate yields a lot of screen space without straining the eyes.

At such a resolution and refresh rate, the monitor did passably well in CNET Labs' DisplayMate benchmark tests. Our main quibbles with the Cornerstone p2450 were some bowing and pinching along the left side of the image, which we weren't able to correct with the pincushion and trapezoid adjustments, and a slight overall blurriness that manifested itself most noticeably on our text tests. Times New Roman text at 12-point size appeared slightly fuzzy, and at 6 points, it was all but illegible. However, the basic icons and fonts on the Windows desktop looked fine. The monitor handled varying shades of gray well, but we noticed a slightly greenish-yellow tint to whites and grays. This flaw was also visible in our high-resolution Photoshop test images. Skin tones were smooth and colors were vibrant, but everything had a slightly greenish look. Fortunately, lower-resolution Web images looked perfectly crisp and true in color. Thanks to the high refresh rate, all the tests were flicker-free. This monitor would be fine for standard home or work computer use, but artists and perfectionists need not apply. Hide Review