Product Reviews

These days 22in monitors need to either offer something extra, or be priced aggressively, to stand out from a burgeoning crowd. But with an SRP of £186 exc VAT, the forthcoming LG Flatron W2271TC doesn't really stand out in the latter area, and its feature set is pretty average too.

It comes with the usual choice of VGA and DVI inputs, and it was very simple to set up initially. The buttons are positioned to the bottom-left of the screen, and we were ecstatic to discover LG has done away with the ghastly jingle that played on every press of the 'fun' button on its W2252TE. It's still filled with pointless options, like applying a Gaussian blur to the screen, but at least it no longer irritates.

We had to lower the brightness and contrast a little, as both were up too high out of the box, and even then we couldn't eliminate a bit of backlight bleed at the top and bottom of our black test screen.

Switching to white

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showed up slightly murky areas of the backlight at the top edge, and it was instantly clear that the LG's viewing angles weren't too hot; the colour tone changed noticeably at 45 degrees.

Contrast was generally pretty good throughout our technical tests which are all still images. It's better at bringing detail to blacks and greys than it is with lighter colours, and we saw minor banding in our gradient tests, but overall it performed well. Then, however, we switched to our real-world tests, which include video and games, and we realised how poor the dynamic contrast is in use.

The contrast is quoted at 20,000:1 and there's plenty of detail, particularly at the bottom end. When it's enabled, however, the backlight brightness swings so wildly during video playback that quickly becomes distracting. It's a bit of a double-edged sword, as without it colours are too washed out and lifeless - our Crysis test in particular looked poorer than most.

There's also a set of integrated speakers, but the sound quality is tinny, with almost no bass at all, while a webcam sits above the display to tempt those who like to video-conference from home. But there's just not enough here to tempt us, even with a relatively low power consumption of 38W. The quality isn't up to par, and the price isn't low enough to compensate, so we'd advise steering clear.