Eizo FlexScan L568

A while back, Eizo made the only TFTs worth looking at, but the competition caught up. With the L568, Eizo has again ramped up quality to become the benchmark. But price is still Eizo's main stumbling block. Most 17in TFTs are perfectly useable for almost all tasks; the L568's price tag is more than double the functional Relisys. For most, the quality isn't worth the outlay. Instead, the L568 will be the choice of large companies who qualify for bulk discounts.

And corporates won't simply want it for image quality. There's an array of accessories and specialist features that come with buying into the Eizo system. Not only is the amazingly thin bezel (10mm at the sides) perfect for tiling, but it's further enhanced with Eizo's swing-arm accessory.

The stand already provides generous movement in every direction, though, including pivoting. A USB connection allows picture management from a PC using the bundled ScreenManager Pro software, which can automatically adjust the image depending on which application you're using. Eizo's Screen Administrator software for centralised network management is also supplied. There's no USB hub, though.

In terms of quality, the FlexScan L568 was leagues ahead of the competition. It was perfect at fine focus and pixel tracking, and its colour purities were unsurpassed. Even a black screen was uniformly black - there was no glow from the backlight. In the saturation tests, every level of white was correctly displayed and, without any adjustment, almost every shade of grey - thanks to the massive 1,000:1 contrast ratio. In the colour ramps, only very mild banding in the white and green bars blighted a perfect score, as did a few faint bands in the darker greyscale ramp. Range on these tests was perfect. The colour scales proved no problem and the 10-bit gamma correction meant that the difficult colour spectrum colour blending was the best on test.

The FlexScan L568 excelled in the real-world tests too. Unreal Tournament played without ghosting or blurring, though there were some fast scenes in the film that weren't quite as crisp as elsewhere. But it was still perfectly watchable. The excellent viewing angles matched the claimed 178 in all directions, and reflectivity wasn't a problem.

If money is no object, this is the best TFT in this Labs, but the Sharp wins the group test thanks to its relatively excellent value.