Verdict: Great quality and features, and you don't have to remortgage your house to buy it

It's relatively easy to pick a winner in any Labs test; it's the product that we'd choose to keep if we could hold on to only one. In some ways, choosing the winning TFT here was even easier, as we'd already looked at the Sharp three months ago, when it took up residence in the CPC Elite.

The Sharp is simply gorgeous. Its model number might not roll off the tongue with the kind of ease that, say, TVR's Chimera does, but this is a TFT with just as much visual appeal as Blackpool's finest automobile.

The back bezel is slimmer than Naomi Campbell viewed from the side, while the silver highlighting adds a touch of supermodel-esque class. The Sharp isn't lacking in features either. For a start, we love the stand. Not only does it look cool, but it also allows the panel's height to be adjusted from 368mm to 438mm.

One particularly thoughtful touch is the lever for locking the monitor at a certain height. This means it doesn't bounce around whenever you touch it, as the temperamental ViewSonic does. Should you desire, the stand can be unscrewed and the panel wall-mounted using the standard VESA 100 x 100mm bracket.

Cables dangle out at the rear without much grace, but there are some clips in the box to keep them in place. You'll find both DVI and D-SUB sockets, plus a built-in power supply that's much neater than having an unsightly black brick lurking on the desk. Sharp includes cables for all the inputs in the box, along with an audio cable to hook up the integrated stereo speakers.

In fact, the speakers are the Sharp's only downfall, being far too quiet to realistically use for anything other than the occasional Windows ping. We do like the front-mounted headphone jack, though, which is much more convenient than fumbling around in a tangle of wires at the back of your PC.

When it comes to quality, the Sharp is again firmly in the drop-dead gorgeous category. Colours are faithfully reproduced and, technically speaking, we saw no discernable banding in the intensity ramp test. This is good news for people who want to manipulate digital photos - you won't have to worry that the colours will appear completely different when you print them out, while the lack of banding means that subtle changes in the shades of one colour will be correctly displayed.

Backlighting is supremely even and on dark screens there's no glow from the backlight, as there is with the Lite-On. As with most TFTs, the top and bottom end of the colour range are slightly truncated, but very dark greys were much easier to distinguish between than on other monitors. This is good news if you're going to spend long nights playing Doom 3 - we picked off the monsters hiding in the shadows before they could move a muscle. If you need it, there's gamma correction for upping the brightness, but it's a fairly lengthy process to reach it through the OSD.

The menus are easy enough to control and there aren't many options you need when using the DVI input anyway. You get five different colour temperatures, and a user setting. The information page also lets you know how many hours the panel's been used for, but this will hardly be a killer feature for most people.

Despite the 20ms response time, games played with a minimum of lag (CRT users certainly won't complain) and looked fantastic. There were also hardly any noticeable artefacts when watching movies, plus the great contrast meant that blacks really are black. The useful Mode button provides access to the four presets: office, sRGB, vivid and standard. These alter the brightness in subtly different ways and we found that the vivid mode was the best for editing photos and watching movies.

In everyday use, the Sharp's excellent technical performance meant that general applications, such as web browsing in Internet Explorer, looked crisp, and difficult text colour combinations remained easily readable.

If there's one criticism we can level at the Sharp, it's that the horizontal viewing angles are worse than Sharp claims. The specs say 170 degrees, but there's a huge loss of brightness at just 45 degrees to the left and right of the screen's centre.

However, unless you're planning on using this as your family-room TV screen - a highly unlikely prospect, we suspect - this isn't really a problem at all. And we're certainly not going to complain when Order247 is selling the Sharp for £286. The looks alone are worth this, but the excellent image quality and the useful height-adjustable stand mean that no other contender can topple the Sharp from the Elite.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - Hard disks / storage
• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260² - Graphics cards
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 - Graphics cards
• Scan 3XS X58 Core i7 - Desktop PCs