After going from two 17″ LCD monitors back to one 24″ Dell 2407 (which I fricken love), I noticed the extra screen real estate of the Dell was inadequate for my editing needs. I needed another monitor for my bins and palettes and that feeling of inadequacy in my gut would not go away.

LG L226W

I couldn’t afford another Dell as much as I wanted one so I set my sights on the slightly smaller 22 inch monitor from LG, the L226W. Unlike the picture above, mine is black all over which is my favourite colour for anything computer related. You should see my setup, black computer case, black keyboard, black chair, black desk, it’s ridiculous (I’m not emo).

One of the things I wanted to do with my new monitor was to turn it around to portrait mode. This is so I could view web pages and pdfs in full screen and because it was just going to be mostly used for my editing bins and palettes, I prefer to look up and down rather than side to side when I am searching for a clip.

Good things about the monitor:

  1. It, as in the monitor itself, looks good. The glossy black base and the matte black finish on the bezel makes it a head turner in my edit room.
  2. Its built quite well. When I took it out of the box, I didn’t hear any creaking or anything to suggest it was dodgerly made. It felt quite solid.
  3. DVI connection is pretty much standard these days but it also came with a HDMI connector to hook up HD sources like Blu-ray and that other one.

Things I don’t like about it:

  1. This thing doesn’t rotate to portrait mode.
  2. One of the selling points to this monitor is it’s amazing 5000:1 contrast ratio. I call it total utter marketing bullsh*t.
  3. The monitor controls are the worst I’ve ever used. Trying to adjust brightness and contrast is a mash of trial and error.
  4. Trying to adjust the monitor via the optimization wizard in the nvidia control panel is a pain. When it tells you to adjust the contrast of the monitor until the top two dark bars blend together doesn’t work! Because they never seem to blend even when the contrast is set to zero!
  5. The viewing angle on this thing is atrocious, it’s a crime against humanity. Any slight deviation from full frontal viewing results in a colour shift. Something to do with it being a cheap ass 6 bit panel.

In summary, the colour and display quality of this monitor sucks. Maybe it is unfair to compare it to my Dell but this is definitely the worst LCD monitor I’ve owned, even compared to my 17″s which I still have. The extremely poor viewing angle and resultant colour shifts makes this monitor quite unusable for any colour critical work.

I give it two thumbs down!