Asus PG191 review

IT's not every day you come across a TFT monitor that plays a jingle every time you turn it on, but bizarrely, the Asus PG191 does just that.

Just trying to turn the Asus on is quite different to an ordinary TFT monitor. After a few minutes of fruitlessly searching for an obvious 'on' switch, we accidentally brushed our finger across the touch-sensitive Power button. All the buttons are placed along the right-hand side of the monitor and backlit with a gentle amber glow. While this looks lovely, actually navigating its setup menus occasionally required us to jab our finger against the same button several times before it realised it was being pressed.

The other novel feature of the PG191 is that in addition to it's built-in stereo speakers, it also has a subwoofer hidden inside its chunky brushed aluminium stand. With a subwoofer attached, the speakers are much better than those found in your average TFT. Unfortunately, being better than something that's absolutely rubbish isn't that hard. Whether we were playing bouncy hip-hop or smooth refined classical tracks, the PG191's speakers left us quite underwhelmed. The bass lacked any real oomph and most music sounded slightly brittle and shut-in. Our Best Buy stereo speakers, the Altec Lansing VS2320s, which cost little justover £20, were appreciably better.

The Asus also has a 1.3-megapixel webcam built-in. Although the integrated webcam is neat, we've seen budget models give a cleaner image.

If games are on the agenda, then you will want to make sure that your TFT monitor has a response time of about 8ms or less. The PG191 has a super-quick response time of 2ms and unsurprisingly, we didn't notice any smearing or ghosting during our games testing. Image quality was acceptable on the whole, but there was some noticeable colour banding in some of our tests and skin tones looked a little cold and unnatural in some of our test images.

Although the Asus PG191 has a very low response time and loads of extra features, the plain ViewSonic VG2021M we review on page 42 gives a higher resolution and better quality image for nearly £80 less.