Well the wifey and I took a road trip (2 hours away) yesterday so I could get a look at a couple of these monitors. The only ones, on my list, that I actually saw were the:
ViewSonic P95f+(aperature grille) - by far the best picture quality. Deep rich color, geometry seemed dead on the mark, good purity across the whole screen. But when I cranked it up to 1600 x 1200 text was quite visibly blurry. 1152x864 was still crisp and well focused. 1280x960 was still acceptable, though very slightly blurry. I, normally, do most of my work and web surfing at 1152x864, so that would be acceptable.
ViewSonic G90F - They had one on display, but it was not hooked up to a computer. I asked the salesman to connect it for me so I could have a look, but he got sidetracked and never got around to it. The place was PACKED with people, and since I had already used a good portion of his time screwing around with the Samsung, I didn't bother to ask again.
Samsung 997DF(shadow mask) - At first look I thought that it must clearly be defective. Colors were very pale and washed out, and the black was quite gray. Assuming that it was simply miscalibrated, I played with the black level at several different contrasts in both the monitor OSD AND, later, the video card software to try to correct it - but to no avail. I tried color temperatures of 6800 and 9200. I made sure that the extra bright feature was turned off etc. No matter what the salesman and I did, we could not get that sucker even close to black. He even reinstalled the drivers/color profile etc. - no change.
In addition to that, the texture was extremely grainy and blurry no matter what resolution/refresh I selected. My wife has a Dell shadow mask CRT which also has this grainy texture to the screen. I just can't get used to it.
Well I finally gave up, deciding that the particular unit was simply defective. So, we went over to Circuit City who also had one on display... SAME THING. It looked identical to the other one!
I really find it difficult to understand why this monitor is highly regarded in reviews across the web. It was HORRIBLE. I suppose it's possible that both of them were defective? If I hadn't checked it on both monitors, I would have thought that the extra bright feature was stuck ON, which might account for the inability to achieve proper black level and color saturation. Maybe someone who owns this monitor can give me a clue as to the problem. It doesn't seem possible that it's supposed to look so ugly. Maybe there is some hidden setting that we overlooked. I don't know.
They had also some Compaq and HP CRTs, but mostly 17", so I had to rule them out from the start, although several of them looked fairly good.
Unfortunately, neither Best Buy nor Circuit City had any Mitsubishi/NEC to look at. Tomorrow we will have a drive to Montréal and check MicroBytes. They carry ViewSonic, LG, NEC/Mitsubishi, and Samsung. So hopefully I'll get a look at some other decent models.