I’ll admit that I have a mean streak when it comes to historically crappy products. I literally spent hours trying to look for something to complain about when I unboxed this standard 17” non-widescreen LCD.

                                              The company website uses a...classic XP wallpaper and a.....photoshopped lady as their welcome screen. Way to go.

Now, don’t assume that this tone that I’m adopting means there wasn’t anything wrong in the product being reviewed – on the contrary, initial inspection turned up a multitude of niggling little faults.

Yet the operational word there is “little” and “niggling”, two words that would never have been applied to the Anbonn brand of yore. That’s a major compliment, mind you. I remember Anbonn as purveyors of super – affordable monitor (sotto voce – super cheap) – products that had big problems performance wise and major issues when it came to quality control. There was nothing nitpicky in my criticisms to Anbonn products before – in fact my opinion of the brand was in the totally negative side of the equation.

                                             The Anbonn L-7Js 17" LCD monitor

And now we have come to this. I look at the box the Anbonn 17” L-7Js  came in and it seems nothing has changed. Frankly, the box looks like something fit for a toy train set, or maybe an especially light dish washing machine. Yellow on black with large lettering for the brand and features is very … discouraging, and the generic box design used for all sizes of Anbonn monitor doesn’t help. It looked for all intent and purposes like the Anbonn boxes for CRT’s, only this time the box is holding an LCD.

Imagine my surprise then when I removed the plastic covering the box and the Styrofoam inserts from the LCD itself – the LCD had a glass protector screen. And behind it was a non-matte display that brought on comparison to Sony’s ClearBright technology, as well as other super-bright screens usually found on laptops. At this point, I wasn’t giving up on finding a major fault; after all, I haven’t turned it on yet.

                                              Similar to Sony's patented technology

Fast forward a few hours, and I find myself staring bemusedly at this latest invader of my desk space – Displaymate testing finished, an HD movie had been run, regular surfing was performed on this Anbonn product, but I could not voice any complaint of quality, or performance; color, or clarity. Especially not clarity. Anbonn’s non-matte display trumped my regular work monitor (brand omitted for reasons of tact) for brightness and clarity of reproduction. Text is cleaner, the screen brighter (without being a strain to the eyes), and testing on Displaymate revealed an unexceptional, though above-average performance.

                                             iPhone design-inspired?

It’s true that the sticker on the screen proclaiming “no dead pixels” looks like it was stripped from a toothpaste box, and the power-brick felt like a plastic tissue dispenser due to its light weight, but getting down to it, the Anbonn L-7 looks good on the desk, with a silver accent running around the periphery of the shiny black cabinet covered my the glass screen. Imagine an oversized iPhone – style screen with a silver lining, and you can get a general idea of this Anbonn’s looks.

I keep going back to the lament of why other manufacturers didn’t think of using a similar setup for their own LCD’s. “A Viewsonic or Samsung with this non-matte screen would look wonderful” – was what I thought, and this again reveals the reserve I have for the Anbonn brand.

Put simply, Anbonn has progressed at an amazing pace from when it sold big, white CRT monitors with abysmal control options and a lousy picture / screen. I was not expecting much from this brand, but now only one word keeps popping up in my head – “surprising”.  Sure, the LED for the power-on indicator isn’t lined up with the pass-through hole, and the chassis controls felt like cheap contact buttons like those found on toy remote-controllers, and the power cable included was of the “slim” variety.

It goes to show that Anbonn has spent some serious resources on design and performance – resources that did not find itself being spent on prettying up the box or the manual. There’s room for improvement on quality control and general packaging, but aside from that, I can heartily recommend this screen for anyone on a budget – the faults it displayed were all niggling little things, and almost did not merit mention, but as I said, I had to get rid of my initial impressions of the brand, and I had to prove to myself that second impressions were of more import, especially when a product improves as much as Anbonn has.

source: http://www.hardwarezone.com/ourvoice/blog/in_the_zone/gear/2007/09/17/Preview-First-Impressions-Last-Unfortunately