Do The New 19" LCDs Pass Muster?

The LG-Philips 8-ms Panel

The new 8 ms panel from LG-Philips has fairly good overall color fidelity.

Recall that this graph shows the difference between the desired color shade and the one actually displayed.

• If DeltaE >3, the color displayed is significantly different from the theoretical one, meaning that the difference will be perceptible to the viewer.
• If DeltaE <2, LaCie considers the calibration a success, with a slight difference remaining, but one that will be all but undetectable to the user.
• If DeltaE < 1, color fidelity is excellent.

We noted great difficulty with the darkest shades - a familiar failing with Philips.

The black level is not the best we've seen, but the monitor's brightness level is a point in its favor - for once, it's not excessive.

The contrast was also very stable on this model. Note that you'll get the best contrast at a 72% brightness setting, but we found that the contrast behaved very well as a function of screen brightness. So you'll be able to adapt the brightness of your 190B6 to suite the ambient light without loss of contrast being a big problem.

This curve indicates the contrast value measured at a given brightness adjustment on the OSD. In theory, brightness and contrast are two independent parameters, and good contrast is a requirement regardless of the brightness adjustment. Unfortunately, such is not the case in practice.

The brightness adjustment is shown on the X-axis, contrast on the Y-axis. Contrast is expressed here as a percentage of the maximum value measured using the ANSI test protocol.