Introduction:
LCD screens are becoming rather commonplace these days, most of
them existing in laptops, although more and more are appearing
on the front desk of many businesses as a show off toy. We all
know what they're like on laptops, but what are they like for
the average desktop situation? Do all the same rules and restrictions
still apply? Weight and space-saving are still a consideration,
but not as much as with a laptop, so the engineers have a bit
more room to play with. Will LCD screens replace CRT-based monitors
on everyone's desks? I'm not answering that, read the review.
I was offered an NEC MultiSync LCD 1525v to evaluate (read: have a play with), by our local Xerox shop, which ironically, is called the Xerox Shop. It was duly delivered by an old friend, Andrew, (who knew I wanted to play with something new), and his trusty sales guy, Jason. The box was handed over, they left, I scurried back to my desk to play.
Playtime:
I opened the box and started to remove the contents: the LCD itself,
a manual and driver floppy, a power pack and two power cables,
one Australian, one for the UK. First thing I noticed is that
whilst it's way thinner (depth-wise, of course) than a CRT monitor,
it was nowhere near as thin as a half-decent laptop's screen.
In fact, the whole thing was about the same size as a closed notebook.
Did the engineers make use of this extra space, to give us an
LCD screen that performs above and beyond your garden variety
notebook LCD?
Size-wise, looking at the screen is a bit deceiving. When the viewable area is measured, it comes out at 15.2", like it's supposed to, which is 0.1" smaller than the "17 inch" monitor sitting on my venerable Mac at work, yet the lcd looks tiny and small in comparison. It's amazing how used you get to all the plastic surrounding a CRT monitor. There's not a huge amount of plastic surrounding the viewable area (Dimensions, 370mm x 360mm x 158mm (WxHxD) inc. plastic) on the LCD, no more than an inch on each side, and weighing in at approximately 4.5kgs, it's not going to throw your back out again if you drag it around the house. But then, that's the whole point of an LCD screen, isn't it?
I plugged in power to the screen, and ran the data cable through all the junk on my desk, removed the video cable connected to my 20" Apple monitor and plugged in the LCD. I crawled out from under the desk and looked at the blank LCD screen and the bored-looking, orange power led. Hmmm.
While you're all wondering what the technical hitch is, and if I broke it or not, the screen retails for approximately AUD$1900.
Well, me being me, I was all excited and hadn't taken notice of the NEC's maximum resolutions and refresh rates, which turned out to be 1024 x 768 and 75hz respectively (With a dotpitch of 0.30, a less than exciting figure, compared to "nice" CRT dotpitches of 0.27 and smaller). I sighed, plugged in the Apple monitor (which had been running at 1280 x 1024), set the res on my TNT2-M64 (don't laugh, it works) to the maximum supported by the LCD, gave it a reboot just in case and watched my desktop appear on the very flat 15.2" screen. W00t. As I had the LCD for a week, I left it as my workstation monitor for a few days. Almost straight away, I was missing the much larger 20" crt I'm used to.
But it wasn't all bad. LCD's do give you a very sharp, clear image. Pixels are definitely pixels, you can see the nice, sharp corners without squinting and web pages are a pleasure to read. Of course, this can work against you, as I found that it actually started to annoy me looking at such a "crisp" image, but that's a personal niggle.
I decided that I'd better start playing around with it, because I was missing the other monitor badly (and the extra 5 inches (3.5" viewable). The screen works well in all resolutions up to the aforementioned maximum of 1024 x 768, which reminds me of a feature of LCD's I love, resizing the new resolutioned image to the edges perfectly. No fiddling with monitor controls. Mmmm... classy.
Basically, I used the LCD over a few days, and it worked well and did what it's supposed to for normal 2D Windows applications, nothing really tries to make the screen whimper. As I've said, it was very nice to view in 2D, although there was a problem that I noticed and that was that the screen didn't seem to be as "bright" as a CRT. It felt very muted and dull, although I'm sure this is because a CRT's brightness is just an indication of how much radiation I'm being subjected to. Perhaps the dimness is just another niggle, but one that bothered me because my eyes tired quite easily reading a dim-ish screen in a bright environment. After missing my 20" CRT too much, I set up my workstation with another PCI card (an old Matrox Millenium) so I could use both my normal monitor and the LCD screen for a while. The LCD, of course, didn't care that this occured and kept on doing its job. I eventually had to return the Matrox back to it's rightful place and went back to using just the NEC. Finally, after a week of LCD'ing, it came to 5pm on Friday afternoon, time for a bit of Counter-strike l33t 0wning action before going home.
I started CS, connected my favourite server, and watched my world go all streaked and blurry. Standing still is fine, but as soon as you do a 180 degree turn or try to track a target, kiss clarity goodbye, it's not going to happen. It's like watching someone wash wet paint off a canvas. Combine this with the "dimness" and it made things rather difficult. One plus was that I wasn't getting any reflections from the ceiling lights for once, but that doesn't count for much when the whole image is blurred, not just the reflection-affected area. I managed to get a few kills, but nothing that would get the cheerleaders visiting the locker room, so I jumped under the desk and swapped over monitors, got a few more kills in on the 20"er, then got utterly wiped out by a 9 year old.
I was not pleased. But this was due to being pummelled more than the LCD.
Conclusion:
My feelings on the LCD are mixed: in 2d Windows stuff, it's great,
nice and pretty to look at, sharp pixels, although you notice
the 0.30 dotpitch, it does look kinda blocky. You'll get
a bit annoyed by it, but no doubt you'd get used it. And as for
Counter-strike and its ilk, we all know these things aren't made
with games in mind: it's size and weight savings, that's really
the point of the exercise, but you can play some games
on them. I'm sure Red Alert 2 or other 2D games like would be
really nice to play on an LCD, as long as it was big enough (and
you didn't scroll around the battlefield too fast), but definitely
not FPS where the action (and bullets) are flying at 50+ frames
per second.
Finally, it's the cost that really leaves me with a less-than-thrilled feeling. It's $1900 for an average-performing LCD, that, in my opinion, doesn't sell itself over a standard CRT monitor, save that it can be hung on the wall (with screw-in plate that attaches back of the screen). You can buy almost four cheap 19" CRT monitors for the same cost, and NEC can't expect the discerning user to cough up nearly $2'000 for a screen that doesn't justify the cost. The good thing is that we are starting to see LCD prices drop, so maybe soon we'll get CRT performance from LCD technology.
The bottom line: It's neat, but the dimness, the dotpitch size and the gaming performance left me ready to give it back at any time, and definitely not willing to fork over almost $2000 for it.
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