Flat panel monitors are great things to have, but they remain depressingly expensive. Big, high resolution flat panels are even nicer to own, and correspondingly painful to finance, but there's some light at the end of the tunnel thanks to ViewSonic.

£1,299 before VAT isn't exactly cheap, granted, but when you consider the following fact, you can see what ViewSonic is aiming at: for an extra 0.6 inches on the diagonal, you will pay approximately £550 more. That's right - the ViewPanel has a 17.4-inch diagonal, and the average 18-inch flat panel monitor currently goes for about £1850 ex-VAT.

Better yet, there actually isn't a catch here. The ViewPanel's native resolution is 1280 x 1024, which is what you get from those £1,850 18-inch displays, and just to top it off, the ViewPanel has a nice bonus feature in the form of its rotating screen.

The idea is not new, but it is good: swing the screen round through 90 degrees, and swap the standard landscape view for a portrait one. All of a sudden you can see and work on whole pages of a document at a time, and once you've done that, the letterbox view suddenly seems foolishly inappropriate for some kinds of task.

The physical act of moving the screen is simple enough, and changing the orientation of the Windows desktop is handled seamlessly by a simple utility which can be triggered by a programmable key combination, so you can switch views and back again in a matter of seconds.

ViewSonic has used a Fujitsu screen manufactured using a modified process called Multiple domain Vertical Adjustment (MVA) which results in improved brightness and a wide viewing angle. ViewSonic quotes a respectable 160 degrees in both planes, and this seems realistic - you certainly get more than enough viewing angle for normal purposes.

The slightly reduced diagonal didn't make 1280 x 1024 harder to work with than it would be on an 18-inch panel. Text and screen objects were fairly small but not excessively so, and the brightness and extreme clarity of the screen made it easily readable.

The cost saving represented by the ViewPanel is so great, and the subjective difference relative to an 18-inch display so slight that it will surely do well. What with the pivot feature into the bargain, this is one of those rare products which really does do more for less.

This display is visually hard to distinguish from an 18-inch flat panel, but your wallet will notice the difference for sure. The pivot screen feature is a highly worthwhile bonus which makes an already good product even better.