monitor Archives - Neil Turner's Blog

LG Flatron W2353V review

November 10, 2024September 28, 2009 by Neil Turner

This is the second of 3 entries about the LG Flatron W2353V (sponsored link), a 23″ flat screen TFT monitor that LG have asked me to review. In my previous post, I went over the basics. Meanwhile, in this entry, I’ll go into a little more detail about the screen and what it is like to use.

Compared to my previous monitor, a 17″ ViewSonic VX715 which I bought in 2005, the Flatron comes in a relatively small box. This is partly due to the detachable base and less polystyrene, so there’s less waste. In the box is the monitor (obviously…), the base, power lead, DVI cable, VGA cable, quick start guide and a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM disc presumably contains the manual and drivers but oddly my MacBook couldn’t read it.

In any case, the screen works fine on Mac OS X without any extra drivers. Despite me having a first generation MacBook with Intel GMA 950 onboard graphics, it can still manage the screen’s native resolution of 1920×1080. This provides a huge amount of screen space. The screenshot above should give some indication of just how much window space you get. It’s enough to show a 2 megapixel image at actual size.

Instead of using buttons, you simply touch labels on the bottom of the screen. The ‘Smart’ button is used to activate features such as auto-contrast, and the ‘Fun’ button lets you apply a sepia or black and white filter to the screen. There’s also the standard menu and a button to switch between multiple input sources.

If I had any complaints it would be the plastic-y feel of the construction. It feels a little cheap – especially the thin transparent strip at the bottom of the screen. This does, however, make the screen very light and easy to carry as there’s very little metal in the construction. The touch areas aren’t very sensitive so sometimes you have to touch more than once for it to register the action.

Overall I’m really happy with it. The size means it’s fantastic for watching films and television programmes on BBC iPlayer, even from a distance. I don’t have any Blu-Ray discs but I’m sure they would look good too thanks to its full HD support.

If this all sounds convincing, watch out for a competition that I’ll be holding in the coming days to win your very own model!

LG Flatron W2353V

November 10, 2024September 25, 2009 by Neil Turner

This post is coming to you via my new LG Flatron W2353V TFT monitor!

I’ll be posting one or two entries about this screen as LG have asked me to review it for them. There will also be a chance to win your very own monitor as well, details of which will be posted in the coming days.

Since I know may of you are techie people, here are the technical details:

Features LG’s SMART technology, which automatically adjusts the screen brightness depending on how much light is around the monitor – this is to help reduce eye strain, and also reduces power consumption by up to 25% in well-lit rooms.
Cinema mode, designed for sites like YouTube – when activated, the non-movie part of the screen is dimmed, so that you can focus on the movie.
2 millisecond response time and no after-image
50:000 to 1 dynamic contrast ratio, to ensure that images are still bright and detailed even in high-light conditions.
Has VGA, DVI and HDMI ports, so you can connect your XBox 360, PlayStation 3 or a Sky+ HD box to it without needing any special adaptors. Comes with VGA and DVI cables in the box.
Native 1920×1080 resolution.
And it’s a whopping 23 inches across!

I’m really pleased with it so far, even it is rather large, but that’s because I’m mostly used to a 13-inch MacBook screen – this is almost twice the size. The resolution is also mind-blowing – you can have many more windows open on the same desktop.

Part 2 of my review, where I go a little beyond my initial observations, will follow tomorrow.

Back online

April 4, 2026May 11, 2002 by Neil Turner

Woo! I’m back online at home! The new 17” monitor is great – it is digitally controlled (as most are nowadays) and has a very sharp display. It looks good too. It’s made by Relisys – I don’t know if it is a good make or not but York Computer Clinic, who sold it to us, say it is a very good brand.

Although I won’t be allowed to use my laptop (when it arrives) until my birthday (darn parents), I have a new gadget for it – a USB->Ethernet adaptor. It means I can use one of its USB ports to hook up to the broadband connection, or, if I end up at UMIST, their internet system. It’s made by Linksys (who I gather are a good firm when it comes to connectivity products). So why didn’t I just get an Ethernet PCMCIA card? Well, although Computer Prices UK (the service I used to find my laptop) lists such cards at prices as low as £23.85, PC World were selling LinkSys cards for a hefty £69.99. This was only £39.99, and has the added bonus that it’ll work on any machine, whether it happens to be a laptop or not. Maybe what I read in the UK PC Magazine about the demise of PCMCIA was true…

The laptop, by the way, is due to arrive on Monday or Tuesday – Comet made a cock-up so they had no delivery address or time. Fortunately, a quick phone call sorted everything out. Buying online is great, when it works, and I think this is perhaps an example where it hasn’t quite worked. Incidently my mother’s credit card company actually rang her up to ask if her card had been stolen, since she bought both the laptop and our holiday (in July) on it, and thus was out of sync of her general buying profile. So a thumbs up to the Halifax Bank for keeping an eye on credit card fraud, even if it was a false alarm.

The computing project eventually got handed in on time; in fact the network server came back up shortly after I’d posted. So now all I have to do is revise for the exam on Monday, which hopefully shouldn’t be too difficult.

In case you’re interested, I’m using a new browser – Crazy Browser. It’s actually just another front-end for the IE HTML rendering engine, but offers many more features, and is very efficient – it doesn’t take ages to load or render pages, unlike Mozilla. Though I may take a look at version 1.0 when the final release is available and the debug code has been removed – and I still have RC1 installed.

In preparation for my laptop, I’m downloading the ISOs for Mandrake Linux 8.2 – after pressure from some of the people in #ODP, I’ve finally decided to venture into the world of Linux. Mandrake is supposedly the easiest to use (or at least to set up), and from experience I know that it can co-exist with Windows, so it’s worth a try. The first CD (the installation CD) has already been downloaded and burnt to CD, and I have 57% of CD2 (the supplementary CD). I’ll probably also get CD3 too, so that I actually have some programs to run; it includes StarOffice, which, along with Open Office, may be the program that pulls me away from the MS suites. Even with a student discount, £110 is still too much for Office XP.

Sorry for the long post – a week without blogging has given me too many ideas to post about 🙂 . See you later!