We used the Nokia Monitor test
program to give the 150T's display a thorough going-over. The
LCD panel proved itself to be very vibrant in terms of colour replication and
a pleasure to work with its' crisp display at 1024x768.
Generally speaking it is difficult to find fault with
LCD panels, other than loss of pixels, slow response times that visibly blur
text, or something major. The 150T exhibited a perfect display, with not a
single broken pixel, and a good enough pixel response so there was no visible
blurring of text.
The panel controls are laid out in a very easy
to use fashion and are accented by the wavy design in the actual bezel. More
importantly is the fact that the display can be auto adjusted by the touch of
just one button, and settings like display input selected on the fly.
Conclusions
There are so many reasons to make the
move to an LCD display, but it is important to remember that in certain
situations they are not quite up to par with a good CRT. LCD's by definition
are limited to displaying 16.7 million shades of colour. CRT displays on the other
hand have a much broader range of colour to play with.
The end result is that in situations where there is a very light
shading of colour, the LCD can sometimes fall short. This is by no means a significant
deficiency, but if you look closely you may notice it.
It is also extremely important to have the screen contrast and brightness settings properly configured if you are a
graphic artist. On the flatscreen that I use for my day to day work,
the HTML colour "EEEEEE" will either be nonexistant, or very visible
depending on the contrast setting. When properly set, I know it should be
a very light gray colour, but sometimes the auto configure button adjusts the screen so that
this colour is white - and this is not right.
The bottom
line I guess, is that for all the benefits of LCD displays (and there
are many; space and power saving being the most important) they
are not a complete one-button fixes all solution. The Auto adjust buttons are
very very useful, but require the user to make some effort to ensure colour settings are
accurate and representative of the real world, CRT or LCD.
The Syncmaster 150T is an excellent LCD display, and with
the swivel multimedia base offers any user many additional options that a CRT
just can't compete with. A low footprint on the desktop, and the option for
portrait display add useful flexibility to just about any desk. The lower power
requirements help to keep power consumption, and power bills equally thin, and
for the image sensitive tech-industry, that grey and silver casing just looks damn
fine!
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