Thu, 19 Oct 2006 LG Flatron L2000C

LG has always been an also-ran in the monitor world, offering a reliable but often unimaginative selection of CRTs and flat panels that do the job but never quite hit the headlines. The success of the Chocolate phone has given LG some positive attention. So has any of that design influence transferred to its monitor division?

Unfortunately not. Visually, the first impressions of the L2000C are underwhelming, and it’s fair to say that the design is more functional and generic than stylish and original. The black metal and rubber base uses a clever finger screw arrangement to make assembly and disassembly of the tower easy without special tools, and the tower allows for tilting and swivelling of the panel. There’s no height adjustment, but the tower can be replaced with an optional desk arm. At the back are sockets for DVI and VGA and for a standard 3-pin IEC mains lead but there’s no USB or FireWire hub or any other extras.

Although the looks aren’t special, display performance is more convincing, with strong colours, good contrast and a decent viewing angle. The format is a standard 20in matte panel with a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 running at 60Hz and OS X users will find that a display profile is already included in Tiger. A Flatron button on the bezel selects one of the viewing modes, which include video, photo, and user. Unusually, these come with a split-display preview that shows how the new mode compares with the current one. Elsewhere in the OSD there’s the usual selection of default colour temperatures, an sRGB mode, and individual controls for red, green and blue. Colour performance can be customised to some extent, so this monitor is accurate enough for graphics work, but not for proofing. The panel switches faster than most – 6ms is the quoted time – so video performance is better than average.