Installation was a no brainer. Plug in power to outlet and 15 pin D-connector to the video adapter. The CM761U does come with a driver diskette which includes color management files, an *.inf file, and a readme file in case you have trouble installing the drivers. Although, I did not experience any discrepancies with the drivers so Win9x should detect it upon boot-up.

A few things that stand out when toying around with this monitor is that it produces a very clear, crisp , and bright image, which makes overall use very comfortable and worthwhile. Even after long periods of use I didn't experience tiredness or drowsiness due to the high refresh rates which it supports. With a 0.22 mm horizontal and 0.14 mm vertical dot pitch, Hitachi's super high contrast tube make both text and graphics appear bright and sharp. Rest assured, with a viewable area of 18", the CM761U allots enough space for you to have many open windows simultaneously and the same applies if you are working with image creation/editing programs such as Photoshop, Corel, etc. I expected some minor flickering on the screen when I bumped up the resolution up to 1600 X 1200 but with a refresh rate of 75 Hz flickering was almost invisible to my eyes and therefore should not cause any significant strain on my eyes. However, desktop icons get really tiny at this resolution so if you have don't the greatest eyesight you'll probably want to keep a resolution setting below 1600 X 1200.

Although the CM761U has a footprint of 15.5" it's ability to produce such crisp text and vivid graphics while not degrading image quality is due to the CRT tube within the monitor. While most manufacturers use a 90 degree deflection tube, Hitachi has chosen to employ a 100 degree deflection angle tube design to allow the the electron guns to be placed closer to the screen and therefore monitor depth can be reduced. Another contributing factor to the CM761U's success in superior image sharpness is Hitachi's new electron gun assembly dubbed Narrow Extended Elliptical Aperature, Multi-Dynamic Focus gun assembly. Essentially, the difference from this gun assembly is that it is 5 mm narrower in diameter, which allows the RGB beams which are hitting the screen to have a much better focus on that particular segment of the screen being drawn.

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