Is Solarism's Future Looking Bright?

Performance

We ran through the complete set of calibration and test screens provided by DisplayMate, and, in general, the LM1503 performed quite well. As shouold be expected with any LCD, there were absolutely no geometric distortion problems whatsoever. Brightness and contrast were quite good, although balancing them was a bit tricky. The pixel response rate was exceptional for an LCD. We noticed no smearing or trails during any of our animation/ motion tests (or while playing games or watching videos). The built-in speakers are nothing to write home about but they aren't terrible, either.

The main problem we found was a general brightness inconsistency, particularly at the edges. The effect was most noticeable along the right edge of the screen and at the upper left of the display.

This shot of a blank (salmon-color) screen shows the slightly uneven intensities in the upper-left corner and along the right edge of the display. We should mention that the brightness inconsistencies seemed to diminish after we had used the monitor for a few days, but never completely went away.

Also, while color reproduction was generally quite good, we detected some unevenness in some of our test screens.

Note the green set trails off earlier than the other colors. This indicates a less-than-perfect color balance.

Here you can see that, when the same screen is slightly overexposed, the blues are not as intense as the reds.

Because of the variations in intensity and the slightly unbalanced color reproduction we can't give the LM1503 LCD monitor a perfect score, but we should point out that most LCDs have similar problems (or worse).