Excellent display (LG L1710B)

Member Name: davidhprice

Product:	LG L1710B
Date:	01/12/03 (4491 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: DVI and analogue inputs, 16ms response time, internal USB and PSU

Disadvantages: no height adjustment

WHen I came to replace my old PC recently, I decided to use a TFT panel rather than CRT display. The advantages of TFTs are small footprint, lower power input and heat (about a third) and larger screen space. To clarify the latter point, a 17" CRT has about 15" display space with the other 2 inches hidden behind the bezel, a 17" TFT however has a full 17" display area and so is equivalent to 19" CRTs - bear this in mind when comparing prices.

TFT's however can have three important disadvantages - colour accuracy, speed and pixel drop-out.

The colour accuracy was not a problem for me as I am not using the display for professional graphics, however the other two potential drawbacks did cause me to do some research.

If you watch DVD's or play games a lot, which my children do, then a slow display results in poor rendering of fast moving images, typically ghosting and artifacts. You need the display to be around 20ms or better. When I started looking 16ms panels were just becoming available so I waited a while until the products had matured before buying.

Pixel drop-out is where one or more pixels can be permanently on or permanently off and this can be irritating as I've had notebooks with this problem in the past. This is all down to consistent quality of manufature & QA so it's another good reason to wait until a panel technology has been around a while. It's important to check the manufacturer's replacement policy as they do vary (eg some will not replace unless there are 9 or more faulty pixels).

After comparing prices and features I finally settled on the LG 1710B. I was originally going to go for the 1720B as it's black andmatches my PC but it only supports an analogue input, whereas I wanted DVI. With analogue the video card converts the digital image into an analogue signal which is then converted back to digital by the TFT. DVI however, avoids these conversion s
tages and should result in a better display.

As a result I picked the 1710B which has the following features;

- full 17" diagonal screen area
- 16ms response time
- swivel base and tilting panel
- DVI and analogue inputs which can be switched (2 PC's on one display)
- 2 powered USB ports for keyboard etc
- self-contained power supply

The latter in particular was a nice bonus as there was no need for yet another power brick on the floor.

The 1710 also has a nice feature called "LightView", basically you can vary the brightness and contrast between a number of fixed and user defined settings to match the display and ambient light - for text, movie or photo under daylight or night conditions. Initially I thought this would be a bit of a gimic but it works very well and is a worthwhile feature.

The quality of the display is excellent, there are no pixel dropouts (yet) on my unit and text is very crisp and at 1280 x 1024 the image resolution is excellent. I had no problems at all setting it up, just plugged it in and booted the PC, Windows XP detected the display with no problems.

Having a "slow" panel on a notebook by comparisson I can say that the fast 16ms response time on this panel does make a signaificant difference for DVD's and games - no ghosting and the picture is as sharp as on a CRT. Windows XP has a feature called ClearType to smooth font edges on LCDs however I haven't needed to use it - the image is that sharp.

The only downsides are that the unit is not height adjustable, but the screen can be tilted, and it's aluminum "silver" rather than black which I prefer (if you consider this a downside).

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