You’ll also know we have a real issue with many claims made by manufacturers. We generally find dynamic contrast (and its ludicrous headline-grabbing figures) detrimental to the movie-watching experience, and we’ve long stopped seeing any real motion blur on today’s panels. Quoted brightness figures don’t often appear to have any relation to the panels we test, and the pre-defined modes for movies, games and text usually make things worse.

It seems we’re not the only ones fed up of wading through hype and misdirection to gauge the actual quality of a monitor, though. The President of DisplayMate himself, Dr. Raymond Soneira, has written an excellent article on US tech site Maximum PC called “Display Myths Shattered: How Monitor and HDTV Companies Cook Their Specs“ in which he dissects these claims with insightful despair.

It’s well worth reading in full if you have even a passing interest in the specs of your PC monitor or HDTV, but the highlights will be reassuring to anyone who feels increasingly lost in a sea of jargon and marketing claptrap. Among the many points, he explains:

• why dynamic contrast modes don’t work, why the “sordid business” of quoting them in place of standard ratios needs to stop, and why a high contrast generally doesn’t matter a whole lot in the majority of onscreen tasks anyway.

• why quoted response time figures usually bear little relation to the actual response time of the panel, and are only really relevant to gamers.

To quote the results of a test in which Dr. Soneira lined up 11 HDTVs side-by-side and got experts and consumers to evaluate them:

“We found that there was no visually detectable difference in motion blur for the mid- to top-of-the-line LCD HDTVs. This regardless of their claimed pixel response times, 60Hz or 120Hz refresh rates, strobed LED backlighting, or motion-enhancement processing. If you find this surprising then just re-read the classic tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

• why, when it comes to colour gamut, wider is not always better:

“A larger gamut will simply make all of the screen colors for standard production content appear more saturated than they ought to appear. Indeed, displays claiming more than 100 percent of the standard color gamut simply can’t show colors that aren’t in the original source image. Expanded gamuts are just gimmicks that make consumers think they’re getting something better.”

There are many more angry dissections and dismissals of features dreamed up in a PR meeting rather than a Lab, and they all refer to the DisplayMate tests we use in every monitor review. As Dr. Soneira wisely says, “the only specs that are useful and meaningful are those in reviews that evaluate every display with the same consistent methodology.” Remember that next time you’re shopping for a new TFT, it might save you a few quid.

The test was pretty low key. For one thing, Lough Erne doesn’t have great 3G signal strength; for another, the boat wouldn’t run the inverter for my T60 Thinkpad without the engine going, so opportunities to download mails and surf (that is, spread discord in various online fora) were limited by the need not to throw up from diesel-fume inhalation.

But Windows 7 RC1 grabbed the Huawei device that Vodafone package up, and inserted that in the dial-up networking pop-up (which for some weird reason shows in the taskbar under an icon that looks like a flat-screen monitor with a mouse stuck to the top left corner). It would connect from that presence when in Lower Lough Erne (that is, not roaming) but in Upper Lough Erne (on Vodafone IE) I had to run the Vodafone application so the roaming would kick in.

Nothing exploded, nothing ran slowly (that wasn’t the fault of the flakey connections off places with names like Inishmacsaint) and I never saw a crash dialog box. We played DVDs in the evening, armed with the Altec Lansing Orbit Speaker for enhanced sound, and VLC to handle the DVDs – the only irritating part being the need to pop the battery out of the T60 so the wheezy inverter could use the boat’s accumulators without alarms tripping left, right and centre.

It’s always frustrating to report things going well, and I was expecting lots of the kind of frustraiton I am sadly used to with Vista, where practically every machine boot kicks off with a 20 minute update session, even on a fast network. But, at least for purposes nautical and leisurely, I must say I found RC1 a good companion.