Two weeks ago my 6-year-old CRT monitor broke, forcing me to upgrade to an LCD monitor. After reading a review on www.firingsquad.com I chose the Hyundai monitor (see entry title for the model number). This was not the best performing LCD in the review, but it was the least expensive. According to the review this monitor is mentioned in a lot of gaming forums as a gamer's gift from above, as it delivers great performance for a tight budget. I have used a number of LCD monitors in the computer labs at school and work, and honestly they all seem to perform similarly. The one factor that I never get to test in those environments, however, is the update speed of the pixels. This happens to be a important attribute when it comes to gaming. I have read comments where gamers get headaches playing on monitors that don't refresh quickly and blur motion across the screen. So after a week here are my thoughts on my new monitor, reduced to a couple of sentences and numbers.
Quality Control: 10 out of 10
When buying an LCD monitor, a buyer is always afraid of getting a dead or stuck pixel. Nothing like viewing a dark scene in a movie and having a central pixel stuck bright red all the time. My monitor has no stuck or dead pixels.
Color Reproduction: 10 out of 10
Take my numbers here with a grain of salt because I am not comparing this monitor side-by-side with any others, but I but see any differences in the colors from my old CRT. I am also very impressed with the software that comes with the Hyundai LCD. It helps fine tune ther color output from your PC so that any discrepancies can be corrected. I think it works very well.
Screen Uniformity/Field of View: 9 out of 10
The monitor can be viewed from a wide angle, however as with most LCD's it fades the wider you go. This fading is not as pronounced as the earlier generations of LCD, but it's still there. I probably would not have noticed this if I hadn't read the review, but if you're not looking dead center at the monitor, there are parts on the edges that darken faster than the center of the screen. For any normal viewing it's hard to see, but if you make the monitor one solid color (like in the color tuning software) you can barely see this.
Update Speed: 10 out of 10
I have been playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory this last week. It's a free online game that's quite fun, especially since the really good players have moved onto better newer games, so I can rock all the poor newbies that still play. As far as the performance of my LCD, I don't see any difference from my old CRT. What a relief!
Overall Satisfaction: 10 out of 10
I'm so glad I read that www.firingsquad.com article and chose this monitor. It takes up less space, using less enery, and puts out the same quality performance as my old CRT. And for those of you that read my earlier post, the monitor does rotate. The only problem with that is you have to change a software setting to get the screen output to rotate with it. It would be more convenient if the monitor could detect the rotation and change the resolution automatically. However, I don't really see the need to rotate the monitor all that often, so this lack of a feature does not disappoint me. If you need to get a new monitor and can spare about $350, then I highly recommend the Hyundai L90D+ 19" LCD Monitor.
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