17" LCD Part II: The Heavyweights Enter The Ring

NEC MultiSync LCD1700V, Continued

Screen response time seems good for dark colors but very slow for whites, and this results in a fairly strong image lag in games, though not elsewhere. It is also tiresome on the Internet where backgrounds are often white and where the lag is very noticeable. The characters run when you scroll.

In darker games such as Dungeon Siege, the results are nowhere near as good as on the excellent Solarism, but when you fine-tune the brightness and contrast, you can bring out details that are invisible with the ordinary settings. The image becomes much brighter, but the colors lose their faithfulness. This may not be a problem at the time, but when you go back to Windows you have to go back to the best average settings of contrast at 50 and brightness at 88.

NEC could have worked harder on the ergonomics. The image self-adjustment function is slow; the monitor has no height adjustment and does not pivot. There is no DVI input either, and the angle of vision is not very good. It is pretty obvious that the screen is a classic TN + Film with quite a bit of loss on the vertical angle.