LG 23ET83 review

The 23ET83V is a 10-point touchscreen monitor. Its glossy white chassis may not be to everyone’s taste, but the frameless edge-to-edge glass bezel surrounding its 23in IPS panel looks incredibly smart. It’s not height adjustable, and it can’t fold back horizontally like some other touchscreen monitors, but we found it a good height for using features such as the onscreen keyboard and pinch-zooming.

As for inputs, the 23ET83 has two HDMI inputs, a single VGA input and a USB port that enables the touchscreen. It also has a 3.5mm headphone output.

The touchscreen was very responsive during our tests. We sometimes found it hard to open links, but we had no problems displaying the Windows 8 Charms bar or switching between individual windows. Its 10-point touch support also made using multitouch apps an absolute breeze, but tapping the screen continuously did make it wobble, particularly toward the outer edges.

Its image quality was a little more disappointing. We normally expect IPS screens to represent around 96 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut, but our colour calibrator revealed it was only displaying 86.8 per cent at its default settings. It was short in all three main colour areas, with particularly poor coverage across the red and blue colour spaces. We managed to increase this to 90.7 per cent after calibration, reclaiming more blues and purples, but this is still far below what we expect to see from a typical IPS screen.

Even with its glossy finish and with brightness set to maximum, our solid colour image tests looked drab compared to our reference screen. Blacks also looked a little grey, despite our colour calibrator having measured a low black level of 0.32cd/m². Whites looked similarly dim.

We measured a contrast ratio of 519:1 after calibration, which is quite low compared to LG’s claimed figure of 1,000:1, and we could only pick out a fairly small level of detail in the darker areas of each image. Its glossy finish also suffered from reflections under indoor lighting.

Thankfully, the responsive touch-sensitive menu controls made adjusting contrast and selecting different colour modes easy. The pre-set colour modes include Text, Photo, Cinema and Game, but we found own custom calibration settings produced the best image. Text deepened the black levels slightly, but Game made the screen appear a little blue, while Cinema and Photo looked too yellow.

The LG 23ET83 is certainly one of the better-looking touchscreen monitors, but it can’t compete with the Iiyama Prolite T2452MTS.