X-bit labs

20" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part IV (page 13)

Category: Other

by Oleg Artamonov

[ 09/07/2007 | 10:38 AM ]

Without much visual extravaganza, the monitor’s onscreen menu is very user-friendly. The developer didn’t try to save screen space or draw pretty-looking icons. There is just comprehensible text here. I have only two complaints about this menu. It does not remember the last changed item. And the cursor automatically moves to the Exit item after you adjust any parameter, which is somewhat inconvenient if you want to set up a few parameters at once (for example, both contrast and brightness). The latter is obviously due to the lack of an Exit button on the L2045w.

The monitor offers a submenu with its behavior settings. You can disable DDC/CI (the interface for setting the monitor up from the PC), change its behavior on turning on and in sleep mode, turn off the Power LED, etc.

By default, the monitor’s brightness and contrast are set at 90% and 80%. To achieve a 100nit brightness of white I reduced the brightness setting to 50% and the contrast setting to 60%. The brightness is regulated by means of backlight power modulation at a frequency of 180Hz.

Color gradients are reproduced correctly, without banding, at any brightness/contrast values.

The gamma curves look good, going close to the theoretical curve for gamma 2.2. There are no problems with the display of darks or lights. The monitor reproduces all of the halftones.

The real temperatures don’t quite match the names of the menu items (for example, the sRGB mode should yield a temperature of 6500K), but there is a small difference between the temperatures of different grays. This difference is no bigger than 300K in the 6500K mode which is an excellent result for an office-class monitor. Many other monitors do not fit into 1000K even.

This is the normal color gamut of an LCD monitor with typical backlight lamps.

The response time average is 11.2 milliseconds with a maximum of 23.6 milliseconds. The L2045w may look good against other monitors that have TN matrixes without response time compensation, but cannot stand a comparison with modern gaming models that have a response of 3-4 milliseconds.

The contrast ratio is average, barely above 300:1 at the maximum.

Thus, the HP L2045w is a good office monitor. It can also be used at home by people who don’t care about its not-fast matrix with small viewing angles. This model stands out from among the crowd of TN-based monitors with similar characteristics thanks to its very neat color reproduction setup and good ergonomics but you have to pay for both in the literal sense of the word. The price of the L2045w is right in between typical TN-based models and more advanced products like the above-described Dell 2007WFP.