After rebate... $529 - 250 rebate... until 1/25 at CompUSA. Presuming the sale is not just local but rather nationwide, it's a good deal. I just bought one. Picture not quite as nice as the Samsung 172T, but still quite good, 1280 X 1024 native... 3 year warrantee too.
good find... thanks. for that price what's the drawbacks? (thinking how I spent $1900+ for my Viewsonic 21" monitors... and one just bit the dust.
bought the samsung 171 V based on some rec here it was a real steal at the time $ 400 after taxes and rebate but within 2 weeks I saw a thin streak 2 inches long diag on the lower part of my LCD screen and I know I did not cause that so I was able to return it for a complete refund and am afraid that all LCD 's might streak like that? :eek:
wait a minute... let me get this straight. one lcd had a prob and now you live in mortal fear of all lcds?? OK
a few notes on the kogi 17 inch LCD: i picked up one today after seeing the posts here. compUSA has a 14-day return policy, with a 15% restocking fee for items with an open box. apparently that is not just for this item, it is for ALL their items. pretty crappy is you ask me.. i ran into other people buying them too. they said best buy has the same thing (except black) for $20 more. i'm not sure what their return policy is, but if it's better then it may be worth it to pay more just to make a statement that we won't put up with this crap. i didn't want black though.. i'm gonna go get some cables (to relocate printer), and later or tomorrow i'll let you guys know what i think of the display. it will be my third LCD and i have one more available VGA output, so i can compare it side by side by side with my 18 inch Techsan (mostly a piece of shit, but cheap and decent for charts and video) and my 17 inch Optoma digital (nice! highly recommended) i figure at $300 it is a pretty good bet.
Maybe you're a little too rough on CompUSA? A couple of years ago I returned an Xmas laptop gift from my wifey-poo. After opening it up to make sure I didn't steal any ram and hadn't registered it, they gave me a full refund... and that was more than a month past the purchase date. (Best Buy probably is all-around better about returns, though.) That 15% restock charge at CompUSA is probably a "changed my mind" return, not a defective part return/exchange. By the way, if a product comes back opened for any reason, they have to recycle it back as used/refurbished and can't sell it as new to someone else just because a customer changed his mind. Personally, I think that's not entirely unfair... and if you're bringing an item back just because Best Buy has it on sale cheaper, CompUSA will match the price. Picture quality on the KOGi 17"... on my P4, Win2000 system, the resolution at 1024/768 was pretty good. It is very sharp at the native 1280/1024... the instructions say it should be set only at 1280/1024. And with a 3 year warrantee, I can't see it being any different than most of the others unless it craps out quickly.
Drawbacks? Can't really think of any. Unknown brand, for sure, but Samsung and Philips are making 80% of the world's LCD panels... likely it has one of those. Plus, 3 year warrantee. Rep at CompUSA told me (a) they used to have too many of them come back, but not lately... and (b) the former warrantee was only 90 days. Now, 3 years. Could be they're making them with better LCD panels now?? I've connected it to 2 of my computers and the picture quality on both is quite good. For the money, I think it's worth a shot.
..since they instated their 15% restocking fee haha picture quality seems good, definitely better than my Techsan. KOGi is much brighter than i expected for a cheapo, and i have the brightness set at only 70% (default). i guess it is a $500 monitor, just on sale. it is not as sharp as my Optoma, but that could be the digital vs analog thing. i would say definitely worth $280-$300. where else are you going to get a 17 inch that cheap. with the economy this way, others may start getting much cheaper soon, too. but this seems to be the best deal going right now. that reminds me, i read something a year or two ago that IBM was developing a much cheaper process to make LCDs and that it would be ready in about a year. it's been probably two years now.. maybe this is an indication that they will be coming out with it soon?