Viewsonic VA1912wb (19" widescreen) - a few issues

[kmmatney]

I just purchased the Viewsonic 19" widescreen LCD. I purchased this over a 20" widescreen because it has larger pixels (0.285 mm) and my video card can drive it at native resolutions in most cases, and it was cheaper. I have one annoying issue, though:

With my old 19" BenQ LCD, I used "Fixed ascpect ratio scaling" whenever I changed resolutions. This put black bars across the bottom of the screen if I was running at 1280 x 960, for example. I would like to do that with this monitor as well. However when I try to set this in the NVidia driver, the image is completely garbled. The only option I can use is "Monitor Scaling" - all three other options for scaling do not work. The monitor itself appears to have no scaling capability at all, besides stretching the image to fill the whole window.

Does anyone else have this monitor and this same problem?

Edit: I am using the DVI connector, and installed Viewsonic's latest drivers, etc...

 

[destrekor]

you probably already did this, but did you install specific monitor drivers as well? i know my samsung lcd's CD installed a driver to added itself to the nvidia driver.

 

[kmmatney]

I tried the drivers from the CD, and the latest from the Viewsonic website. In both cases, I can only use "monitor scaling". What's even worse is that when I launch games at 1440 x 900, like Quake3 based games, the screen is so garbled that I need to reset my computer just to get back to the desktop.

I only have a narrow range of usable resolutions, if I go outside of this, the screen gets garbled. I cannot scale the image at all, except for stretching to full screen width. Ths is getting very annoying!

My old BenQ 19" LCD never had any of these issues.

I have tried 2 different DVI cables. Next, I'm trying the analog cable.

Arrrrg....

 

[kmmatney]

Things work a little better with the analog cable. I don't have any garbled output, and Quake-3 based games are running well. The only problem is with the scaling. The onitor refuses to scale, so games that do not support widescreen are fully stretched.

 

[fueledbymetal]

That sucks - I was considering this monitor but if it's stretching fullsceen games to widescreen I'm going to have to pass

 

[wpeng]

Is this a common occurrence with WS monitors? I had a 2005fpw before I decided not to keep it, and it had scaling options that worked perfectly.

 

[kmmatney]

Yeah, this is really starting to suck. The DVI connection is totally hosed. When I try to swtich resolutions, it seems to default to some high resfresh rate and the screen gets garbled, sometimes causing me to restart. It doesn't do that on the VGA connector, so that's what I have to use for now. I really need to figure out if I have a defective unit, or if this is how this monitor normally behaves (which would suck).

Still no luck with scaling.