19" LCD Monitors: The Spring 2006 Collection

Overshoot

This NEC's lack of preciseness is reflected in a good deal of overshoot. A given color sometimes took more than one frame to stabilize.

In Use

The brightness is much too high, which means that you can cross this monitor off your list if you use your computer to work on documents a lot. But in any case, for that kind of work, it's always better to avoid monitors with filters. That advice also holds true if you're interested in photo retouching. In this case the filter produced nice vivid colors, but in fact their fidelity was relatively poor. You're likely to get some surprises when you print your shots.

On the other hand, this monitor is quite usable for gaming. It may not be accurate, but at least the 90GX2 is fast. Ordinarily with a filter monitor, it's better to play in the dark to avoid reflections on the panel. Here, that's not the case thanks to the excessive brightness. So if you don't want to get up and close the curtains, you can just boost your screen's brightness. But you'll have to sit a little distance away if you don't want to burn out your eyes.

The video performance, however, was catastrophic. Light leaked into the black bands above and below the movie, which has a negative effect on the visible contrast. The monitor is fast enough so that latency doesn't creep in too much, but video noise was very visible on color masses and on shading. The sparkling is really bothersome, even at a distance.

Conclusion

The NEC 90GX2 is not really cheap. For the $470 price, you get a good monitor for gaming, but nothing else. There are other models tested here that are better.