Eizo FlexScan L887 review

Eizo's FlexScan L885 held our 20+in TFT A-List slot for more than a year. Thankfully, its successor, the FlexScan L887 retains its strengths.

In fact, there are few differences. The look is identical, but you can't choose beige any more -only grey or black. The stand is excellent, giving comprehensive tilt, swivel and spring-loaded height adjustment. There's even a cable channel, although using it makes twisting the screen to portrait mode awkward.

At the back, there's D-SUB as well as DVI inputs. There's also a USB connector to link to a PC, allowing you to change the settings via the ScreenManager Pro software. All the options we'd expect are there, including the ability to set colour temperature from 4,000K up to 10,000K, as well as tweak gamma, saturation, hue and gain. There's also six-colour adjustment, where you can change hue and saturation individually across the RGB axis.

Changes may also be made from front-panel OSD buttons, including selecting FineContrast modes - presets for specific roles such as text, picture and movie. But the software can assign them to applications and auto-switch on program launch.

Performance under DisplayMate was impressive. Signal lock was rock solid, with zero flicker in our pixel-tracking tests. Black was pure and there was a superb level of detail in dark areas. Up at the high end, the L887 showed subtle and even distinctions all the way. A 256-step greyscale ramp was smooth to the top end with no banding. It's backed up by consistently solid backlighting.

The L885's colour-combination strength also applies to the L887, effortlessly handling combinations many other screens find awkward. Definition was similarly impressive, with even the tiniest of fonts free from ghosting. Skin tones on images and movies are natural, although with a response time of 20ms it's sluggish on fast-moving images and games. The only other disappointment was that input from the analog D-SUB was markedly softer and noisier.

For the most part though, we can't fault the FlexScan L887; used over the digital input, performance is all but flawless. The price premium over 19in models is significant, but if you need the extra resolution this is the best we've seen.

Author: Roger Kirckwood