Quick LG L204WT 20" widescreen review
Just had a few days to play with this and first impressions are good.
Appearance
http://direct.tesco.com/pi/Product/0/200-2110A.jpg
I've got the black one (-bf) and it looks pretty smart, though I think I'd rather have the silver one now (-sf) because the black looks a little bit cheap. Plus points are the extremely thin bezel, small footprint, and no seperate power supply. Negative points are that it does look a bit cheap, and the plastic produces all manner of noises when you try and adjust it. It also wobbles a bit when I bang my desk.
Accessories
It comes with both DVI and VGA cables (so I've got a spare DVI cable now :p), quick start instructions and a CD. There are no detailed paper instructions or technical specifications - these are on the CD as PDF files.
The CD autolaunches, but the nice user interface only links to manuals. To install the monitor drivers you actually have to go through device manager and 'install from a specific location' which when you select the CD it finds without problem.
Display
Right off it's very very bright - I immediately took it down to 50% brightness which is roughly the same level as my CRT. Colours are pretty vibrant, and there's no banding/gradients visible over DVI connection at all, at least on the standard XP Home background image or during 3dmark06 which usually highlights problems during game 4 (the snowy scene).
Surpisingly there's no blurring during screen wide movement at all. What is slightly noticable compared to CRT is a lower refresh rate (mouse pointer position does not update as rapidly when I'm whizzing it around). This does make V-Syncing a slightly more critical thing than it was with the CRT. The only other thing is slightly less vibrant colours during games - the desktop looks vibrant, but grass in Test Drive doesn't look as deep green as I remember on the CRT.
This monitor is meant to have a dynamic contrast feature, where the backlight is adjusted to make bright scenes brighter and conversely dark scenes darker. Several reviews mentioned it getting in the way, but if it's active on the modes I use (normal, user, text) I've never noticed it, except that blacks do look very black!
I've not really played with the setup yet - you can adjust RGB, sharpness, gamma, brightness, colour temperatute, as well as several preset modes. The movie mode made my desktop look horribly vivid, like someone had whacked up the contrast too high. Text mode makes it look a little bit more vivid, and infact I found this to be the best mode for games.
I've not tried calibrating the monitor with any self-test websites yet, as I'm not on the web at home anymore, but initally it looks very similar to my CRT, so quite good setup out of the box.
Scaling is remarkably crisp. There's no native 1:1 mode, so use your graphics card for that, but seeing the clarity of other resolutions I'm not sure I'll bother.
There's either no backlight bleed, or it's uniform, but the dynamic contrast engine would probably mask any situations where you'd be able to see it. Zero dead pixels out of the box too.
Value for money
The monitor is a around 150-160 quid inc vat. That's cracking value for a 1680x1050 capable display with low response time and good colours (or such good dithering I can't see the difference).
Conclusion
It's basically a repackaged samsung s205bw, with an added dynamic contrast engine (variable backlight) and cheap but minimalist surround. To get better than this I think you'll have to start going to the Dell Ultrasharps, which are considerably more expensive.
It's allayed most of my LCD colour fears (as far as banding goes) but doesn't quite match the colour deepness of a CRT (yet). Gaming with this monitor *is* as good as running a CRT, just as long as you can get the framerate out of your graphics card!
Re: Quick LG L204WT 20" widescreen review
Re: Quick LG L204WT 20" widescreen review
so Kal....what's it like for Spread sheets? How sharp are the lines/boxes/text when you get a really fine column, or really small font?
