CTX S762G review

There are two approaches to manufacturing good-value equipment. You either cram everything in and sell it on the number of features for the money, or you concentrate on the basics and get the price as low as possible.

The S762G falls into the latter camp, but with a twist. Instead of including a captive D-SUB cable, CTX opts for the DVI route - but again makes it captive. If your graphics card only provides an analog signal, you can use the non-captive D-SUB input instead.

But the benefits of the digital input are immediately obvious: you get a crystal-clear picture without having to delve around in menu options. Backlighting is strong and contrast is well up to par. The Desktop looks great, with sharply defined icons and naturally balanced colours.

Our technical tests, using DisplayMate, failed to show the panel up either, with most passed comfortably. Tonal separation at the lower end of the spectrum was excellent, although it tailed off at the extreme top end. In practice, this means that dark scenes in games and movies will be more effectively displayed, but very pale images less so. There was also an impressive lack of banding in colour ramps, and graduations were smooth in both colour and greyscale. The only real issue was a slight weakness in the red area of the spectrum.

It's a double-edged sword when it comes to DVD playback, as the sharpness of the panel tends to highlight any compression artefacts present. The unremarkable 25ms also contributes to a less-than-ideal experience, with motion blur evident while gaming. Viewing angles are also a touch disappointing, particularly in the vertical. But for everyday use, this is an excellent panel.

We found the menu system reasonably intuitive. There are limited options to configure colour handling, with only colour temperature switchable between 6,500K, 9,300K and user-defined RGB, but with such good performance out of the box, it isn't a big issue.

Whether you agree with CTX's description of the silver and black livery as 'contemporary' is a matter of personal taste, but the bezel is at least slim, and build quality is robust. Add in the stereo speakers and integrated power supply, and it's a good package. Its problem is the Iiyama ProLite E431S (see A List, p49), which offers slightly better performance for the same price.

Author: Ross Burridge