An excellent purchase for the price and much better than I expected…since for the longest time I’ve never been one of those who thought LCDs were as good as CRTs in terms of versatility. I’m now convinced otherwise.

No offense…but IMHO anyone who spends 30 minutes playing with the setup trying to get it “picture perfect” is being too picky…especially when they’re fully aware of the pricepoint before installation.

These monitors are terrific for movies, gaming, surfing and just about anything else you’ll likely do with your PC. There are no dead pixels in either monitor, the contrast and colours are uniform across my entire desktop and the viewing angles are entirely acceptable if you set the montitor height and angle correctly to your sitting position.

I am fortunate enough that I can afford to buy better monitors if I chose to but after us them for the last three months I have no reason to. I’ll keep them until they explode.

The other interesting thing is that my monitor (brought in China) was supplied with both the VGA and DVI cables – although this seems to be standard for China (even HP ship their printers with cables here!)

My beefs with this monitor had everything to do with brightness. Could it be indicative of the VGA connection? Possibly but if that’s the case, even that’s unacceptable.

I use it primarily for high-quality photo-editing, so I need precise everything.

Immediately upon playing with Adobe’s “Gamma” settings, I realized they’re useless with this monitor, it simply has too much contrast to use the “Gamma” system.

So I hooked up an expensive borrowed LaCie art monitor next to it, “gamma” adjusted it, and set about using the included “Forte” software to mess with the LG.

Basically, Forte does OK, but then once you close it, you have to use the monitor adjustments to set your sharpness to 5 and drop the phase to “0″, and brightness should be at “100″, contrast in the 50’s (mine’s at 53). Temp is 6500K, Gamma -50

And, you have to do this every time you boot, because you’re using 2 separate systems to optimize it. I’ve got it down to about a minute.

So, for $200ish, you get a great monitor if you don’t mind tweaking it a little every time you boot.

I sometimes get a little “flicker” even when I use it as a single monitor, but at this point I blame my older 2-port but only 128Mb graphics card. As the 512Mb cards have dropped into the $60 range for my P4 small-form-factor computer, I’m gonna grab one soon to hopefully eliminate the flicker. Sometimes if I change my “Phase” to 50, the Flicker stops.

At least it only flickers when it’s thinking hard, but if I’m surfing the web after I task it to a big job, I have to surf with one of my other computers or it’s a little rough.

So: there are better monitors out there, but for the contrast ratio and the colors, it’s great for $200ish if you don’t mind manually adjusting at every boot.

I have no noticeable “fade” at the edges, but I have a stupid “dead” bright-green pixel in the upperleft quad.

Anyway, there’s the Python follow-up for nerds.

I am convinced that many people will like the LG monitor though – especially at the price level given by Best Buy. I just didn’t particularly enjoy it.