Philips 190X7FB review

Most monitor makers go for a plain black or silver surround, with as thin a bezel as possible and a pedestal stand.

Not so the 190X7FB from Philips. This is a strikingly designed display, with its square styling, large shiny front and broad U-shaped stand. The stand is attached and can be folded back for storage. This means it isn't possible to wall mount the display, nor is its height adjustable. The bottom of the screen sits a reasonable 110mm above the desktop, but if this is too low you'd a separate monitor stand to raise it. For the best ergonomics, the top of the screen should be level with your eye.

A one-port USB2 hub is built in, handy for quickly plugging in devices such as a flash memory drive without reaching to your PC. Built-in 3W stereo speakers are located behind a long grille below the screen. Integrated monitor speakers are never that great, but these are particularly tinny, to the point of being painful to listen to.

The control buttons are tucked down the side, which meant we had to turn the screen to see what we were pressing. To make up for that there's a neat touch-sensitive area on the front, which you use to control the power and switch between the five viewing modes. These cover office work, Internet, image viewing, video playback and gaming; brightness, contrast and colour settings automatically adjust to suit the material most likely to be displayed with these tasks.

There are DVI and D-sub connections, and we ran our tests over both. Focus was good, giving a pin-sharp Windows desktop. The DVI input is HDCP compliant, so it'll work with HD DVD or Blu-ray players. It's a good screen for movies, giving a sharp picture with rich, vivid colours. But it's not widescreen, so it might not be your first choice for this job.

Colours and contrast were even deeper in video playback mode, but not as accurate. Photos looked good, too, although switching to image viewing mode didn't make any appreciable difference. For gamers, the fast 2-millisecond grey-to-grey response time means there's no smearing or ghosting when objects move around the screen.

Author: Lynley Oram