Asus PW191 LCD Review

Tom's Hardware has quite the flattering review of one of the latest LCDs coming from Asus, the Asus PW191. From the review: "I won't mince words. The PW191 is the handsomest monitor I've ever seen. It's true that people's tastes vary, but no one can deny that the Asus designers have talent. While a lot of their competitors are using a white Macintosh look for lack of better ideas, Asus is innovating, offering designs that are both personal and novel. And they've applied that know-how to good effect in designing the PW191. The monitor's lines are superb, and the choice of colors is elegant and restrained."

So tempting

[DingerX]

to paste the subtitle of the article "Looks can deceive", the tag: "Unfortunately, its performance is not always on par with its design." and the performance section, then slam slashdot and Tom's Hardware for shameless advertisement, and watch the karma arc from +5 informative to -1 troll.

But I'm lazy. So I'll just point out that they laud the design, but not the performance, and the review is not quite as gushing as the slashdot summary suggests.

Re:Acer LCDs

[caston]

The article it talking about Asus not Acer...

Re:What's with the pheedo link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a direct link [tomshardware.com], which I suggest people click instead.

Nice selective quoting

[Tim C]

Here are a few more selected quotes:

Asus has decided to follow the trend and use a panel with an optical filter. That was a mistake. Despite the manufacturer's claims on its Website that the reflectivity of the optical filter is especially low, when viewing a dark picture, the LCD panel is as reflective as the gloss-finished shell.

As always with panels that use filters, the colours are showy. They're well saturated, but imprecise, as our calibrator test shows...

The colour rendering was far from being ideal. Frankly, I can't understand why LCD manufacturers insist on using these filters when the results are always so mediocre...

Asus didn't use overdrive technology for this panel. The result is that it's not really a contender as far as responsiveness is concerned... It's no catastrophe, but this kind of latency takes us back a year or so...

I was waiting to see how the PW191 would perform screening movies. And sad to say, video noise was still much too evident. A lot of sparkling was visible. Note that Asus offers a sharpness adjustment (which is rare on an LCD monitor) that lets you soften the focus slightly. That helped a little, but the sparkling didn't disappear completely... We hate to harp on this issue, but the optical filter means that you'll have to watch your movies in total darkness, especially if the film tends to be dark (e.g. Sin City or The Matrix).

And finally, from the conclusion:

The finish is exceptional. It's probably the best-looking monitor available on the market today. And beyond the good looks, the picture is very sharp and the colours are very good in video games. In itself, the PW191 is a good product, but it's obvious that the panel was poorly chosen. It's slower than its competitors, yet doesn't solve the video-noise problems that plague them.

So, it's a good monitor, apart from the LCD panel. Forgive me if I don't rush out to get one... (Or am I completely out of touch and all LCD monitors are this bad?)

If you don't mind a 'traditional' look

[elvstone]

Get a Samsung SyncMaster 930BF [samsung.com]. I like it very much, and they also have a 2 ms variant that is a bit more expensive. Okay it doesn't look very dashing, but it performs :)

The problem with LCD monitors/technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Every mainstream LCD monitor I have seen has very subtle hue or brightness changes with even very small changes in head position. Because of this each eye actually sees a slightly differently lit picture, due to the slightly different horizontal position of each eye relative to the monitor. This leads to what could be described as a "glare" effect. It subjectively appears like a glare, becaue it is similar to how a shiny surface appears in the sun, with different amounts of reflected rays hitting each eye. It is most noticeable on the outer horizontal edges of the screen which often appear slightly darker than the rest of the screen. Perhaps I am particularly sensitive this as no one else seems to mention it. Then again most people don't raise concerns about the visual effects of 60hz refresh rates on CRT either.

Re:Widescreen Resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

um, the problem is not that he got a widescreen display, the problem is that he got a display with less than 1024 vertical pixels. I suspect he would be complaining if he bought a new 4:3 display that had a max resolution of 800x600 as well! As you are probably aware, they do make widescreen displays with larger vertical resolution. For example, the larger two of these displays [apple.com]

6 bit color?

[peanutious]

The first page of the review shows that the color count is 16.2M, this typically means that each channel is only 6 bits or 262,144 true colors dithered up to 16.2M. If you spend much time editing pictures, 6 bits per channel can drive you nuts. More details here [about.com] On the positive side, Asus's website shows a 1 year ZBD (zero bright dot) warranty, and a 3 year panel warranty. link [asus.com]

Re:What's with the pheedo link?

[layer3switch]

Ah, I just solved the mistery.

http://www.tomshardware.com/site/rss.html [tomshardware.com] will get you to http://www.pheedo.com/f/toms_hardware [pheedo.com]

Pheedo is probably Tom's Hardware RSS feed service provider.

As far as on Slashdot, I'm not so sure if linking 3rd party news feed rather than direct link is allowed or not. CmdTaco can vertify this, but I see why not, as far as I can tell, this is service used by Tom's Hardware for RSS feed.

Re:Those fat borders are ugly.

[bigpat]

hell, even a dell has smaller borders than this thing. What does it look like next to another 19", that is what I want to know.