Product Reviews

LG's Flatron L226WTQ is a 22in widescreen monitor with a 1,680x1,050 native resolution. It has a thin 13mm silver bezel at the top and sides and a glossy black stand. The display swivels and tilts, but doesn't pivot and isn't height adjustable.

The L226WTQ's most remarkable specification is the 5,000:1 contrast ratio, which LG proudly claims as a UK first. However, this is a digital fine contrast (DFC) ratio, where software analyses the image, optimising the backlight and colour luminance to achieve the high contrast ratio. DFC is switched on only when the monitor is in the preset movie mode.

There are six control buttons under the front of the display. As well as power, auto and source buttons, there's an EZ zoom button and another labelled F-engine. This cycles through the movie, text, normal and user modes. Manual adjustments to brightness and colour can be saved in the user mode.

When you select a new mode, a split-screen preview

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shows the original image on the left and the enhanced one on the right. Switching to movie mode, which activates DFC, gave our test movie clips a rich, vibrant look without making them oversaturated. Blacks looked deep and dark, while lighter scenes looked bright. Problems arose in scenes where there was strong contrast. For example, when a blue bottlenosed dolphin leapt out of the water against a bright background of sunlit sea, it shimmered black. With DFC switched off, the problem vanished.

We preferred the image quality achieved by adjusting the settings manually. Blacks were black, and whites pure and bright. Some fine details in darker areas of high contrast weren't picked out, though.

Pressing the EZ zoom button reduces the screen resolution down one setting; press it again and it restores the display to the original resolution. This is aimed people who might have difficulty seeing small text and icons at the display's native resolution. It doesn't make them that much larger, though, and the result is at the expense of clarity - the image looks softened and blurry. Although the monitor has a horizontal viewing angle of 170 degrees, in practice we found that just moving a little to the side resulted in the screen darkening.

At the rear are DVI and D-sub inputs, and the DVI interface is HDCP compliant. There are no extras such a USB hub or speakers, though. The L226WTQ is capable of excellent quality, but the DFC is problematic. It's affordable, too, but HannsG's HW223DP has more features for a similar price.