LG L172WT review

An LCD screen with a TV tuner seems to be the perfect space-saver for a small room. LG's Flatron L172WT is the latest display to offer this dual functionality.

It certainly looks the part, with its sleek silver case giving it the appearance of a high-quality TV set. What's more, its 17" widescreen panel has the correct aspect ratio for watching TV and movies and is large enough for PC work.

It's also surprisingly well kitted out with DVI-I (analogue and digital) PC inputs, as well as component, S-video and composite inputs for standard AV kit. All the cables you need are provided in the box.

Picture quality wasn't great when we used an analogue input from a PC, and the picture looked slightly washed out. However, switching to a digital input greatly improved things. Colour reproduction is generally very good, although greyscales suffer slightly from patches of different intensity.

The panel's native resolution is 1,280x768. It accepts an input of 1,280x1,024, but at this resolution images look squashed and text is distorted. The contrast ratio of 500:1 is average for this type of display, but the 25ms response time is more problematic. It is certainly unsuitable for games, as it causes ghosting when displaying fast-moving images.

In TV mode, the auto tune facility found the five terrestrial channels and correctly labelled them by name. The picture quality was good but far from outstanding. We found that we had to adjust the brightness and contrast settings manually to obtain the best picture.

The TV is operated by a remote control, which enables you to access advanced features including picture-in-picture and a multi-channel preview. It's all simple enough to use, while the onscreen display makes it easy to switch between inputs.

At £385 the L172WT is priced very well, but its slow response time makes it suitable only for people who don't want to play games.

Author: David Ludlow