Finding the Best 19" LCD Monitor for Your Application

In Practice

Our reaction to the NEC 1970GX's performance with office applications was mixed. The brightness was clearly too high. Though you can lower it without losing contrast for word processing, the color fidelity suffers, so photography buffs will have to get used to working with blinding lighting. That makes you question the wisdom of moving from a CRT to an LCD monitor. Getting rid of the flickering to burn out your retinas with the equivalent of a 500-Watt halogen lamp is avoiding Scylla only to fall into Charybdis.

On the other hand, gaming is clearly the NEC 1970GX's strong suit. It's as responsive as you could hope for, and in addition it offers stunning colors thanks to its OptiClear filter.

For video, though, it's a catastrophe. The viewing angles were too narrow, the reflections on the surface of the panel were frankly distracting, and halos of light were visible in the black bands at the top and bottom of films in 16:9 aspect ratio. We won't even mention the video noise, which is always relatively high on this type of panel. The unit was frankly disappointing in this area.

Conclusion

It would be hard to recommend this monitor, since its price is so far above the competition. Yes, the panel is fast, the color fidelity is good, and the design is attractive. But the disadvantages in terms of video are impossible to ignore. The NEC 1970GX is an excellent gaming monitor, that's for sure. But gamers might well do better to look at the L90D+ , which is less lovely to look at but has equivalent performance.