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Entered CNET Catalog: 05/22/2003
SKU: 0792343172567
Manufacturer: Sceptre Technologies Inc.
Manufacturer description
Sceptre is well recognized as a leader in its field by the computer industry. Manufacturing world-class products is just the tip of Sceptre's iceberg. What unfolds the key to Sceptre's success is understanding and providing the different services to each of its partners and channels, which entails the trust of many. PRODUCT FEATURES: 17" 16:9 Wide Screen TFT LCD; Super High Contrast / Brightness; Wide Viewing Angle 160? (H) / 160? (V); Optional Connectors for PC, TV, DVD, Camcorder and Game Console: VGA, DVI, Cable TV / Antenna, S-Video, Composite, Component Video (included with a extension cable), Sub-Woofer, Earphone; Surround, MTS, Stereo and SAP; PC Picture in Picture; Easy to use Remote Controller; Tilt and Swivel Base; Wall/Arm Mountable.Product summary
The good: Includes a built-in television tuner; can connect to cable or VCR; displays images from two sources simultaneously; loud, clear stereo speakers; warranty provides strict limits on bad pixels.
The bad: Short warranty; minor onscreen distortions.
The bottom line: The X7SV-Naga's built-in television tuner, wide-screen format, and support for analog and digital PC graphics controllers make it a good choice for movie buffs.
CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 04/07/2003
The panel tilts from a couple of degrees forward to 25 degrees back, and it swivels 30 degrees left and right on a lazy Susan-like wheel, which makes it easy to reposition the screen as you move around at your desk or in your easy chair. You can also remove the panel from the base for mounting on an arm or a wall bracket. (Sceptre doesn't sell arm- or wall-mounting parts, but the panel complies with industry standards, and it should work with products supplied by Ergotron, Innovative Office Products, and other vendors.)
The Naga supports most common video sources. In addition to analog and digital (DVI) ports for your PC, it has ports for a coaxial television antenna, satellite feed, or cable; video and audio input ports for data from a VCR or a DVD player; and ports to send audio out to headphones or your PC's subwoofer. The ports line up in a depression at the back of the panel, but in contrast to the common LCD design, they're set far enough out from the panel that you can loosen or tighten the thumbscrews without skinning your knuckles. Sceptre packs the Naga with five cables for most of those connections. Heavy plastic flaps snap in place over the ports, and you can run the exiting cables through a thumblike hook built in to the base to keep everything tidy. The Naga's television tuner can also scan your cable or satellite feed to determine what channels are available, and it can tune in as many as 125 channels. Cool.
CNET's testers always keep their eyes peeled for product-design weaknesses, but in this case, we have only one aspersion to cast: very tall people might find the screen too low and wish the Naga could telescope--that is, slide up and down on its base.
Setting up and running the Naga is simple. Plug it into your PC's analog or digital port, plug in the cables for other sources that are handy (VCR, DVD player, or TV, for example), and flick on the power. You can then use the monitor's onscreen display (OSD) menus or the remote control to activate and swap between feeds. To operate the panel, use the Function left and Function right arrow buttons on the bezel to find items in the onscreen display menus, then use the Adjust plus and Adjust minus buttons to change the settings. You'll find the same buttons on the included remote control, which also has keys for adjusting the volume, changing channels, and so on. The Video Options menu has a System setting that switches between NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, useful if you've collected videos from various parts of the world. (However, Sceptre doesn't consider the Naga Mac compatible, and CNET did not attempt to test it on a Mac.) Another item on the Video Options menu, the Freeze command, stops the image on a single frame so that you can take a closer look at fine cinematography.
With the picture-in-picture (PIP) feature, which overlays the image from one source with one from another source, you can adjust the size of the top window to cover one-eighth, one-quarter, half, or three-fourths of the screen. By comparison, another recent TV-enabled, wide-screen LCD, Sony's Personal Entertainment Display SDM-V72W (which has no PIP capability) lets you switch between only full-screen views of the computer or another source. (Sony's monitor costs about $250 to $300 more than the Sceptre X7SV.)
Sceptre makes some bold claims about the Naga's capabilities. For example, the specified 500-to-1 contrast ratio and 400cd/m2 (nits) brightness--especially in concert with response times of 15ms rise and 10ms fall--should make everything that the screen displays look perfect.
But we found more than one flaw in this monitor's performance. Some minor distortions appear on the Naga screen, though the problems are subtle and won't bother you in everyday use. To illustrate, in a series of progressively paler shades of gray, a few shades at the top of the scale appear white. And in a similar series of color shades, transitions between shades don't appear perfectly smooth. In tests that contrast very bright areas adjacent to very dark areas, some light "leaked" into the darker pixels. Also, on a broad area of a single color, we noticed some pixels brightening and darkening as if they couldn't decide what shade to settle on, but that situation is rare.
When you work with the screen, you'll notice that text is a bit marred by barely noticeable grayness or fuzziness, but graphics and DVDs look bright, crisp, and colorful. We tested the Naga on a DVI signal from the 128MB Nvidia GeForce4 Ti 4600 graphics controller in CNET's 730MHz Dell Dimension 4100 test bed. We also looked at the screen displaying the same test bed's analog signal, which creates somewhat richer colors but also seems to slightly increase the fuzziness around text.
17-inch LCD image-quality test (Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Brightness in nits (Longer bars indicate better performance)
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In general, Sceptre offers decent support for the Naga, but there is one glaring shortcoming: You get only one year of warranty coverage. Most LCDs, including some other Sceptre products, offer three or even five years of warranty coverage.
Although Sceptre says that its lifetime, toll-free, telephone tech support is available weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. PT, we called several times and were always shunted off to voicemail. Instead of leaving messages in the void, we tried e-mailing tech support, but we never received a reply. Monitors don't require a lot of support, but still, it would be comforting to know that someone was there in a pinch.
On the bright side, Sceptre has one of the most generous bad-pixel policies in the industry: just three dead or stuck pixels qualifies you for an exchange. The Naga's printed manual provides unusual depth of information for a display manual, covering setup procedures, how to operate the controls, and how to adjust rarified features such as clock and phase rates for fine-tuning pixel alignment and focus. In our opinion, too many displays come with just a two- or four-page flier covering a few technical issues, such as cable pin-outs. Unfortunately, the company's Web site has only a cursory FAQ on LCDs, and the download pages don't yet have documentation or drivers for the Naga line.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 User Rating: 
1/10
Short-lived, poor service
Pros: Nice initial display
Cons: Not durable; no service available outside the U.S.; speakers are awful
User Rating: 
2/10
Horrible product and even worse customer service!
Pros: There are no pros for this screen
Cons: Horrible product that does not last
User Rating: 
4/10
Awesome until it died after 16 months
Pros: Great for DVD and TV playback, many inputs, and a remote control
Cons: slightly clunky design, bad user interface, unusual button layout for remote, burned out in approximately 14 months- just after the warranty expired.
User Rating: 
10/10
Very good layout widescreen is best, amazing clarity
Pros: Very clear compared to my old CRT this monitor came with everything including the DVI cable people were complaining that there's didn't come with one just so people konw it is used for digital hookup makes very clear pic wide screen is best can't go wrong
Cons: Name sceptre not recognized to bad because these are a very nice monitor.
User Rating: 
8/10
Works great to watch TV & Movies in my bedroom.
Pros: Nice clear viewing of TV, DVD and videotapes, and it looks good on my dresser.
Cons: I would prefer to have more controls on the unit, rather than needing to use the remote all the time.
User Rating: 
9/10
The Best Monitor ever -- without question
Pros: Amazing Picture Quality As I am a computer technician, I have seen the entire spectrum of monitors and this is one of the best I have seen so far
Cons: I use it on my main desktop and have had no problems with it at all!
User Rating: 
5/10
Deeply flawed, but still really nice!
Pros: The screen is lovely, and I can't imagine going back from widescreen. I just wish more games would take advantage of it! I have my DVD player and computer hooked up to it. TV quality is good, not great. Speakers are more than acceptable for being atta
Cons: As others have stated, there just seems to be no way to get widescreen to work on DVI. Alas. I have tried everything I can think of but no good. And support is totally NONEXISTENT. If you have any doubts or confuse easily then you may want to steer cl
User Rating: 5/10
No PAL Tuner, OSD is odd
Pros: Good price. Nice solution for American NTSC reception combined with computer use.
Cons: While the screen is capable of displaying PAL and SECAM, the supplied tuner only receives NTSC. The company has no plans to product PAL / SECAM tuner versions. Reading the manual implied that it was a universal / multi-system tuner, but it is not. Also
User Rating: 4/10
Good monitor. Bad support
Pros: Bright screen. Lots of inputs.
Cons: It doesn't matter how good a product is... if I can't reach someone for a simple question - it stinks. Sceptre's email addresses are undeliverable - there's nobody at the toll-free number - I've left messages - NOTHING.
User Rating: 9/10
Great Features and Performance
Pros: We also have a tv tuner card but the picture quality is not very good compared to the monitor's tv feature. We use the PIP all of the time. Also, DVD quality is much better than I would have expected. I have two home theater setups in my house and we f
Cons: Like many of the other posters, I also cannot get the 1280x768 on DVI. It works for VGA but the quality is not as good as DVI.
User Rating: 4/10
Non-existent customer service
Pros: update to my previous posting: I like the integrated TV and remote.
Cons: can't get 16:9 mode to work with my computer. over 7 days, have called and left 3 voice messages, and 3 email messages for Sceptre technical support: no reply. very frustrated.
User Rating: 10/10
Time to buy stock in Sceptre
Pros: Cheaper (only in price) than most other 17" LCD's I got mine for $498 (after rebates). Tons of hookups, widescreen format, Picture-in-picture, crystal clear quality. You can watch TV while surfing/gaming, and it doesn't tax your CPU or memory at all.
Cons: None, except I wish I could have found the 26" version. I didn't give any service/support points because I haven't had to use them yet.
User Rating: 
6/10
Confused about set up
Pros: Good image quality.
Cons: Sits too low. I need a monitor stand. Also I can't get my PC to send in 16:9 at 1280x768 resolution. It only is at 1024x768 so the image doesn't fill the screen. I've tried all kinds of settings and upgrading my graphics driver. Now I need tech support
User Rating: 9/10
Can't miss on this one!!!
Pros: I was looking for a lcd monitor for weeks and have read reviews of several including the X7SV. What particularly caught my attention was that it has a built-in TV tuner which was perfect for my application. I planned to put a computer in our kitchen an
Cons: One year warranty only but aside from that, none.
User Rating: 
7/10
It is very good LCD
Pros: This LCD has many function, and it satisfy me.
Cons: The only problem that I have, I can not see a full view when I play my playstation 2 (just for NCAA football 2002). Others are fine.....
User Rating: 7/10
It's even a great TV!
Pros: When my POS Hauppauge WinTV-USB device thankfully kicked the bucket, I began shopping for a new TV tuner (I have a Dell 8100 notebook with a 15" UXGA display driven by an ATI Radeon 7500 with 64Mb). After examining all my options, the Sceptre came out to
Cons: I thought the requirement to return the warranty card within seven days was just plain rude. The speakers are integral and add about 5.25" to the overall width of the monitor. Given that most people who are in the market for a wide-aspect monitor probably
User Rating: 10/10
Bright & Sharp LCD monitor/TV
Pros: screen brightness is perhaps its greatest feature. I compared its brightness level to other LCDs and it ranked among the highest. Furthermore, it has so many inputs that you can use this as a great monitor, tv, or even a small home entertainment center
Cons: None...except no one's ever heard of this company "Sceptre"...too bad they make some great products
User Rating: 8/10
A high quality, full-featured LCD
Pros: Pretty much every input you can imagine. Built-in TV-Tuner takes the load off my older-computer so it doesn't have to process TV-signal. A very good price, widescreen for DVD's works like a charm. I will most likely be purchasing another for Christmas
Cons: For some reason I can't make my ATI Radeon 7000 to send a 1280x768 DVI signal to the monitor. I'm not sure if it works right. Right now I'm using VGA.
User Rating: 7/10
Very good monitor w/ lots of features.
Pros: Great for DVD's & computing. PIP feature is also quite nice, not to mention its a good looking monitor. Widescreen is the way to go. . . love the remote control as well.
Cons: The TV picture leaves something to be desired, but overall, very little to complain about.
User Rating: 8/10
nice monitor/tv
Pros: TV works great! Especially connected to coax via my VCR. Great Resolution. Very bright screen. All types of inputs. Because you can connect virtually any device to this monitor, it won't soon loose its usefulness.
Cons: Picture in picture is limited to DVI and VGA use. I was looking for a full screen tv mode with my computer's desktop as the picture within the picture. There's no way to rotate the screen without some extra hardware; too bad, because a screen this size
User Rating: 8/10
Just what I was looking for; no suprises...
Pros: Amazing picture and quality! No dead pixels. It has multiple inputs and all the feature that anyone could ever need!!!
Cons: NONE YET!!!
User Rating: 7/10
one sweet LCD
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 7/10
Good Product for sharp eyes
Pros:
Cons:
