Benoit Dupont

Since our last review, LCDs have gotten cheaper, but not necessarily better. We put the screws to eight 17" LCD monitors to see which ones came out on top with wares from both new and veteran vendors. Some pleasantly surprised. Others didn't.

Faster LCD displays are what gamers want and now BenQ says its FP71e+ delivers the industry's lowest latency-value yet at 8ms. But what happens during the heat of an Unreal frag fest or fast-action scenes in Pamela Anderson DVDs?

Shuttle's XP17 LCD, the company says, is high on design and concept for the nomadic, LAN party set. But after making a name for itself in the mini-PC world, can Shuttle live up to its LCD ambitions?

We can't say it often enough: Don't go by manufacturers' specs in choosing a TFT display, which are often stamped by the innate optimism of the Marketing department. We were previously unable to measure LCD monitor latency under real conditions in a satisfactory and coherent way and had to rely on the old-fashioned human eye. But now, that is a thing of the past.