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LCD monitors are undeniably cool. The biggest innovation to occur in display technology since colour, they use less space, use less power, display brighter and sharper images and emit less radiation than the CRT you're probably looking at now. So why doesn't everyone use them? Because, as well as adding a certain "Star Trek" appeal to any desk, they also add a clear indication that "this person has a larger toy budget than most". They're still, to be honest, mind-numbingly expensive compared to CRT monitors. However, this is mostly because of the difficulty of manufacturing them with a good yield, and like all products the manufacturers are getting better at making them over time, so the prices are falling and should keep doing so until they start to seriously compete with CRT's for the consumer display market.

I've had this unit from Acer sitting on my desk for a good 6 weeks now. It's been on the games box but now lives on my main workstation that I use for writing articles, surfing the web, photoshop work etc. The savings in desk space are substantial compared to my old 17" monitor. "Ah! No fair!" you cry, for me comparing a 15" LCD with a 17" CRT. Well, in terms of usable screen space they DO compete. A long-standing pet hate of mine is the blatant lies that you see on the sides of CRT boxes. 17" monitor! (16" viewable). So what's the other inch? Non-viewable? As in, you can't see it, because it's not there? Surely that makes it a 16" monitor, then..? If not, given that the viewable area extends to the plastic frame on all 4 sides of the screen, where is the extra inch? On my desk I normally have 2 17" monitors, an IBM P70 - nice and sharp for the workstation, and a Sun Microsystems 4472 (don't ask), slightly lower spec but good for the games box. On both these monitors the viewable area is just under 16 inches, 15.7 in the case of the IBM. The Sony ES100 15" monitor on my GF's machine is about 13.9 inches. This LCD screen is actually listed as a 15.1" monitor and the viewable area is bang on 15.1 inches. Hopefully Acer are not the exception here, and other manufacturers are also being honest in the description of their LCD monitor sizes.

You can see in the image above that the LCD really is tiny depth-wise. This shows it in comparison to the P70, listed as 17". It's also much lighter, but at 5.8kg perhaps not as light as you would expect. It surprised me too, but remember there's still a lot of glass in it despite not having a CRT. It's also very very flat.

Display
My experience with using LCD screens has so far been limited to automatic teller machines, my palmpilot and the occasional laptop at work. I though it would be much the same as looking at a decent TFT screen on a laptop. However, there really is very little in common between looking at any of those screens and looking at a proper desktop LCD monitor. The main thing that struck me about the LCD monitor during usage was the brightness of the display. In fact, brightness is not really the right word, because that implies you could simulate the effect on a CRT by turning up the brightness control to maximum. This is not true. It's like the difference between a peice of green cardboard, and a peice of green cellophane with a light behind it. No matter how light the cardboard is, it's never going to be as bright, the colour is never going to be as rich, as the cellophane and bulb. This adds a strange depth and intense clarity to the viewing experience. Once you go back to using a CRT you can clearly see that the monitor is drawing the image on the other side of a peice of glass. On the LCD there seems to be nothing between you and the text - in fact the background seems to be a fair distance behind the text and icons, which seem to float in mid-air, surrounded by the plastic frame of the monitor.

There are some drawbacks to this type of display, however. Firstly is that they look best from straight ahead. Anyone who's owned an old laptop can tell you how moving your head a few inches in any direction from dead-centre will make the colours fade, the brightness dip and the text hard to read on an LCD screen. This effect is present on this monitor too - not incredibly badly, but it's noticeable. This would be irritating to a hardcore graphics professional. In fact, in my last few reviews, I found myself having to compensate for the brightness of the monitor when editing images. If I made them appear ok on the LCD, they would be incredibly dark on the CRT (and, presumably, reader systems as well). I did try to use Photoshop's monitor calibration, I fiddled with the various settings on the monitor, but I couldn't make it acceptable. Maybe a hardcore graphics professional knows a solution to this, but I couldn't find it.

There's also the question of broken pixels. As I understand it, when LCD screens are made, they're sealed in glass BEFORE being fired up and tested. This means that, if you make a bad one with lots of pixels that don't work, you have to basically throw it away and make another one. There's a certain threshold at which manufacturers decide there are too many broken pixels and chuck the screen. This means that you invariably get one or two pixels that are either stuck on or stuck off on your nice new LCD monitor. Their on/off state and where they are on the screen affects how annoying they are. The test unit had one stuck-on red pixel at low centre and one stuck-on green near the right edge of the screen at middle height. Most of the time this was not annoying, but if you'd forked out over $2000 for a screen and DIDN'T know about the whole broken pixel thing, you might be making an irritated call to your supplier.

The sharpness of the monitor at it's native resolution is also very impressive, text and window edges etc are very clearly defined. Native resolution? Ahh, another LCD peculiarity. Basically, this LCD monitor is designed around 1024x768. In fact, it quite literally has 1024x768 physical pixels on it, so no matter what resolution signal you send to it, it will display 1024x768. This means that if your video card is set up to display 800x600, the monitor scales it up and you lose a little definition - it's not quite as sharp. You cannot display higher than 1024x768 - I can't imagine you wanting to on a 15" monitor anyway. It quite happily accepts a range of resolutions from 640x350 up, and a range of refresh rates up to 75Hz in all resolutions. 75Hz is enough for anyone, but when it comes to actually drawing the image on the screen, the input refresh rate becomes irrelevant next to the physical time it takes for each pixel to refresh. In fact, I'd say the pixel refresh rate was quite low indeed on this unit, running a Q3 timedemo or even just playing a fast-paced game leaves a faint ghostly trail behind any moving object - in the case of a first-person shooter, the whole screen is often moving so it becomes quite hard to see small objects accurately. If you're a hardcore railgun freak in Q3, your accuracy will go out the window. This was perhaps the most dissapointing aspect for me, and the reason this unit was moved off the games box.

However, the acceptance of normal input refresh rates means the days of special video cards for LCD monitors are long gone. I used the monitor successfully with a variety of video cards using NVIDIA, Matrox and ATI chipsets with no issues. When you first plug it into a card, you need to configure it using the magic blue button on the front..

The "i-key" blue button is a single-press setup, which automatically does v-pos, h-pos, pixel clock, phase and colour for you. You want to press this the first time you use a new resolution, or if you change video cards. The other controls are simple and easy to use, just like any modern monitor really. You've got the usual contrast/brightness, horizontal/vertical positioning and colour balance. You don't have any of the geometry settings associated with CRT's like rotation, display size and that bending-in-at-the-sides one I've forgotten the name of. You also get "phase" and "pixel clock", which seem to have the primary purpose of removing odd wobbly artifacts from the screen when the magic blue button doesn't quite get it right for you.

Conclusions
So, after all that, are you going to be slapping an LCD down onto your desk anytime soon? Well.. I'm not. I use my PC for playing games, surfing the web and authoring/graphic work. For reasons I've described, this particular unit is unsuitable for fast-paced gaming or image work. It's fine for surfing and general business usage - excellent in fact, once you get used to the brightness and sensitivity to viewing angle. Add to this the price range this monitor will likely fall into (it's not currently available in Australia, but it's sibling the FP558, a very similar unit with inbuilt speakers + USB carries an RRP of AUD$2299 - a quick look around Eyo reveals you could pick up FIVE of Acer's "Vivid" series 17" monitors, or come in only $200 shy of a 21" Sony Trinitron for the same money) and it starts to only look attractive to people for whom space or power consumption is absolutely critical, or who have a strong need to impress people, or for whom the normal rules about money don't apply. All these point towards corporate users and I expect we will indeed see more of them in corporate offices soon. In the meantime, though, mere mortals like you and me would be best off sticking with our big fat power-hungry radiation-leaking CRT's..