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| LG Flatron 577LH LCD | // review |
| Who'd a thunk it - reviewing a monitor. Well, being the all-around bloke I am I volunteered to have a look at this beasty. Now in no way am I a hardware junky, so don't expect me to go all numerical on yo ass and spout technical features, luminances, candle powers, Hertz ratings or anything like that. No, I'm looking at this monitor as someone who works in front of a computer screen all day. Whenever I mention LCD monitors to people the most common reaction is one of horror. LCD's are notorious for their lack of pixel persistence - that fuzzing you get when you change the image quickly, meaning that playing Quake won't be happening any time soon. I can clearly remember trying to play Duke Nukem 3D on an old Compaq laptop (the most common place you find LCD screens) and the blur was so bad you could barely see what was going on. No, LCD screens are best known for thei applications in laptops - obviously - and in situations where space is at a premium and clarity of text is required. So imagine my surprise when I set up this LG LCD as my primary monitor and loaded Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. I originally thought it would be a strain for me, since my primary monitor is a lovely 21" ADI MicroScan, an absolute beast of a monitor that takes up a large portion of my available desk space. I plonked the LCD down in front, plugged it in and in about 5 minutes had it up and running. There are monitor drivers available on a floppy disk, but Windows ME worked quite happily without. My first initial disappointment was the resolution, although that was mostly because I've become used to working at 1280x1024 and anything lower seems like too little screen space, even though I can clearly remember being amazed the first time I obtained a video card that supported 800x600x256. The LCD screen quite happily runs at 1024x768x24bit, or 768x1024x24bit. Hang on. 768x1024? Yep - that's one of the features of the LG 577LH - it's a rotatable LCD, meaning you can switch to Portrait mode by installing the portrait support software and rotating the screen in it's central axis. For Word Processing and Email it's a godsend, allowing you to see much more of the document than normal. You don't need to install any new video drivers, and it's fully compatible with your existing video card - in my case it worked extremely well with a GeForce 2 GTS. Amazingly enough, you can even play 3D accelerated games in this rotated position, although the side to side view is perhaps not the best... LG have also thrown in some small extras that make this monitor more than just a fancy piece of hardware. There's also a 4 port USB hub built in, which is very handy as it's a powered hub and doesn't suffer from the degradation that unpowered hubs are prone to. You can adjust most of the monitor settings using the front panel buttons, little switches that react to your finger rather than any pressure on them. There's also an auto-set button that surprisingly works. If you fiddle around with the settings and stuff something up, this button will automatically restore optimal positional settings for you. And strangely for an LCD it includes Brightness and Contrast settings, so you can turn it down late at night. Something that is perhaps not really of great value for most people, but could be useful for people like myself, is that the box has a handle on the top, making it very easy to pack the monitor away and take it to LAN parties and the like. And with the extremely high refresh rate this is a monitor I would take with me. Because yes, you can play games on it. My first port of call was not Word, or Email, or IRC, but Elite Force - I wanted to know if I could still play games. Playing on BarrysWorld (the only place I play) I found myself having no difficulty maintaining my game play, and the clarity of the LCD was not compromised to an appreciable extent by fast, jerky movements, meaning my compression rifle sniping was up to par. I did notice the odd piece of display tearing, but it was not really noticeable. I like this monitor, I really do. It doesn't have the same resolution range as a standard monitor, this is true, especially with it being hardwired to a maximum of 1024x768. I wanted to test out it's flexibility, so I wandered out and bought myself an S3 Virge 4Mb 2D card. Why you ask? Well, Windows ME (and 98SE as far as I'm aware) support multiple monitors. My GeForce is an AGP card, so I originally tried my spare PCI Vanta TNT2U, but since they're both 3D cards they had a tendency to conflict rather badly and I ended up having no luck at all. The S3 though works remarkably well, once you convince Windows ME to actually boot properly. The only problem I have encountered so far is that Windows ME with multiple monitors is very stable once you get it going - it's the getting it going that takes a lot of work. The LG Flatron 577LH now coexists quite happily alongside my 21" monitor, running at it's maximum resolution of 1024x768x24bit, with my primary display running at the higher 1280x1024x32bit that I prefer. To give you an example of what is possible, check out this screenshot - beware though, it's 2304x772. I know it's not purely relevant to the review, but it's nice nonetheless. So how do you score a piece of hardware? Well, generally I'd compare it to something similar and work out a rating from that. but not having used or seen any other LCD monitors apart from the one on my laptop, there's not really a lot of comparison I can make. | |
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