Product Reviews

Last issue we looked at a new 20in LCD monitor from LaCie, the Photon20Vision which took on the increasingly competitive large-screen LCD market by including as many value-added features as possible. The latest product from another big name in the monitor market, NEC's 20in MultiSync LCD2080UX, is similar to the LaCie product in many respects.

A thin bezel around the edge of the screen makes the unit look deceptively small. However, the design of this unit means there's nowhere to hide the cables. Instead, the monitor is supplied with a piece of plastic, affectionately referred to as a cable cover, that slots into the back of the stand. We found this particularly fiddly to attach, and it didn't do much to hide the cables even when it was in place.

The input ports are awkwardly positioned along the lower edge of the back of the display. The way the stand is positioned can make it tricky to get to the ports, although pivoting the screen so the ports face out to the side makes access easier.

There are three input ports: two DVI and one VGA. This allows you to plug in either two computers via DVI or one DVI and one VGA. The VGA port is grouped together with one of the DVI ports as Input 2. Toggling between the two inputs is a simple case of pressing the Select button below the screen,

We're surprised the LCD2080UX doesn't have a built-in USB hub. Although this is far from essential, it's a pretty standard feature among modern monitors and it can be very useful, particularly if you want to keep your Mac on the floor.

Like the LaCie, the NEC is mounted on a simple and unobtrusive stand. The stand is well constructed and nicely designed. Despite being slim and barely noticeable, it allows great freedom of movement. A rotating platform on the base of the stand enables you to swivel the whole unit through an entire 360. Just watch out for getting cables caught or pulling them out of their sockets as you do this. A spring-loaded, height-adjustment mechanism lets you

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raise the screen from 1in above the desk up to about 8in. You can also tilt the screen slightly forward and relatively far backwards.

On rotation

Just like the LaCie Photon20Vision, one of the NEC LCD2080UX's key selling points is that the screen can be pivoted through 90 clockwise, so it can be viewed in portrait instead of landscape mode. However, again like the LaCie, there's no Mac OS X version of the pivot software. There's a Mac OS 9-compatible version, but it wreaks havoc if you try to run it in the Classic environment. As if that wasn't bad enough, we were stunned to discover the OS 9 pivot software was so old it couldn't handle the LCD2080UX's native resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels.

To add insult to injury, once we'd run the pivot software and had the monitor displaying at the maximum resolution the software could handle (960 x 1280 pixels), a message flashed on screen telling us this wasn't the optimum resolution.

PC users get the NaviSet utility, which allows you to control the monitor's settings from the Desktop rather than using the on-screen display, provided you have a digital connection. However, no equivalent of this is provided for Mac users. What's more, while the LaCie unit ships with an ADC-to-DVI adaptor so you can plug it straight into your Mac and maintain a digital connection, the NEC LCD2080UX comes with DVI and VGA connectors only. Fortunately, most recent Power Macs have both ADC and DVI output, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

The NEC LCD2080UX boasts excellent image quality. The picture is clear, with consistent brightness and contrast across the screen. It also offers top-notch colour fidelity, although it's not supplied with its own ColorSync profile.

The on screen menu system is controlled by an array of tiny buttons along the bottom of the screen. The menu itself has a rather old-fashioned, unintuitive interface, although it's very thorough and you can fine-tune the monitor's setting as much as you want. However, we found it wasn't necessary to make any adjustments at all.

Making it big

A final point to mention is the price, which at nearly £1200 seems rather steep for what you get. LaCie's product costs £200 less and comes with a wide range of extras.

The MultiSync LCD2080UX features a beautiful screen mounted on an impressively versatile stand, and we're sure it will prove popular for PC users. However, its scant Mac support in terms of pivot software and lack of ADC connectivity mean it's unlikely to come high on the priority list of the discerning Mac shopper.