LG L1980U LCD: The New 19" Panel on the Block

Application Analysis

The core of our LCD benchmarking comes from real application analysis. We play with a lot of monitors and it gets easier for us each time to pick out problems with an LCD just by using the right application. Here are a few quick looks at some demanding full screen applications. We already ran ColorVision's OptiCal software, so all of our monitors are calibrated and adjusted to the same curves.

High Definition Video – As always, we played the WMV9 1080p version of Coral Reef Adventure to test our monitor’s ability to play high definition video.   Like the Dell 1905FP, this monitor is not really suited for widescreen full motion video, but we were a little more concerned with the colors on the display anyway.   We may just be a little sensitive to the issue, but there was a clear distinction between the 8-bit Dell 1905FP and the 6-bit LG L1980U.   The Flatron was less vivid and often off-color in several scenes.

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The Matrix Reload, The Matrix - We use the Matrix series to test full motion video on our LCDs. Since the Matrix isn't the best movie to test color reproduction, we typically only look for motion blur on gray-to-gray transitions or other imperfections in the signal.   Unlike the Coral Reef Adventure, we detected almost no artifacts or washed out colors in this clip.   It may have just been the specific clip that we were viewing, or it may be the case that 480p version of The Matrix doesn’t stress our displays as much as 1080p video in the previous examination.

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World of Warcraft – If you have had the misfortune to install this game, then you’ll know that it’s easy to spend hours at a time looking around on the ground for things to pick up.   Although other displays like the Apple Cinema 20” gave us difficulty from time to time to detect subtle objects in the game, the Flatron L1980U takes the prize as the worst display on which to play this game.   We attempted to adjust our settings with the f-Engine and various color schemes, but much of it was to no avail.   Subtle objects like plants were nearly invisible to us on darker levels and instances.

Max Payne 2 - The extreme light and dark transitions in Max Payne still provide us with the sufficient criteria to benchmark transient response time; specifically, we can focus on the light and dark extremes. We found almost identical problems to the ones mentioned during World of Warcraft; specific objects were too difficult to detect under any combination of brightness or in game contrast.

Halo, Unreal Tournament 2004 – Halo, which has relatively muted colors compared to Unreal Tournament 2004, was fairly pleasant to play on the Flatron L1980U.   Darks and lights seemed on par, although colors are generally exaggerated to begin with.   Both Unreal and Halo were responsive and we could not detect any motion blur.