Box Contents

Inside the box you get a DVI cable, 15-pin D-Sub cable, cleaning cloth, User Guide/Driver on CD and Forte Manager  (screen calibration software).

Specification

• EPA Energy Star Compliant: Yes
• Ports: DVI, Analogue 15-pin D-Sub
• Image Aspect Ratio: 16:10
• Image Brightness: 300 cd/m2
• Image Contrast Ratio: 3000:1 / 5000:1 (dynamic)
• Image Max H-View Angle: 170
• Diagonal Size: 22" widescreen
• Dot Pitch / Pixel Pitch: 0.282 mm
• Max Resolution:1680 x 1050
• Colour support: 24-bit (16.7 million colours)
• Horizontal: 30 ~ 83 kHz
  Vertical: 56 ~ 75 Hz
• Response Time: 2 ms
• Power Consumption Operational:45 Watt
• Power Consumption Standby / Sleep: 1 Watt

Design

We initialy bought the monitor in Piano black, but you can get the screen in silver/black as well which is slightly cheaper (about £159).

For a screen which costs less than two hundred pounds we were mightily impressed with the quality. With its back finish it looks the part and weighs a substantial amount (5.7kg) to assure you that it is an LCD built to last.

Whilst the stand - which sturdily attaches to the main 22" screen - cannot be raised higher or lower, it can be pushed back or rotated left to right.

The front power on button can also be turned off via the Forte Manager software (more on this later), so if you are annoyed by the blue led at the front you can fix this yourself.

To the left (underside) of the screen you have a set of controls which are comfortable to press and offer various adjustments to your screen, for example there is an EZ Zooming button which will set your screen into a lower resolution automatically, then you have brightness, contrast or gamma adjustment, choose from preset colours from sRGB, 6500k to 9300k or adjust individually the R G B colours, sharpness and horizontal/vertical positions.

You won't find a headphone port or speakers on this screen and the lack of a HDMI port may put some people off, however to compensate the screen itself is great for playing games or watching movies and the DVI port does support HDCP, so you could grab a DVI-to-HDMI cable and conenct the screen to a PS3.

In use

Straight out the box we were pleased to find no dead pixels on the screen, which in fact was the first LCD we have ever used that did not have any.

We then began to do natural testing, by using the LCD for the last month with standard Windows programs, movies and games.

In Windows we had no problems working with Word, Outlook or paint packages. A small amount of adjustment is needed to setup the screen to begin with, but this does not take very long.

The games we used to test the screen were COD4, Crysis and Battlefield 2 and we found that the colours at its 1680 x 1050 max resolution looked fantastic (for Battlefield 2 we used a Widescreen fix). Plus we found no ghosting or issues to report with any fast paced action either (thanks to the 2ms response time).

Additionally during games blacks were also especially good, with a contrast ration of 3000:1 this was not really a surprise.

To make the screen even better you have a piece of software supplied on the disk (which we updated straight out the box) called Forte Manager, this allowed us to run through a series of Wizards to setup the monitor and also to pick from a selection of settings which boost the screens performance for a given task.....

So for example you have a setting for Movies, Text, User defined or normal. When selected for movies this effectively boosts the contrast ratio to 5000:1 and this enabled the LG to have the best blacks we have ever seen on a monitor of this value.

Running through Sleepy Hollow, which is a very dark Tim Burton film, there were no problems in distinguishing any areas of the picture that were dark.

What's more we found the black performance to be useful for viewing dark pictures taken with a digital camera and then viewed on the screen. Previously we had a photo that was to dark to see properly on our older screen, with the LG however we could not only see the image clearly, but we could also make out somebody in the background which we could not see before.

Of course as mentioned the screen does not have internal speaker or headphone port, but in fairness most speakers are normal poor anyway for this price and we are glad LG spent the time perfecting the screen.