Verdict: Okay for a cheap secondary screen, but not good enough to be your main display.
You may have read on the cover that we are reviewing a selection of widescreen TFTs this month, with prices starting from £130. 'Aha! I've found a mistake in Custom PC,' we hear you cry. 'This widescreen costs £104.' Perhaps you're also wondering why, when we've devoted 13 pages to widescreen TFTs in our Labs test (see p70), that we're also including them in the Reviews section? Fear not, we haven't let the lack of a proper summer send us completely insane.
The TFTs in this month's Labs test focus on the two most common and widely used resolutions: 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200. However, these resolutions require a good graphics card if you're to use their high pixel counts to their full potential. Thankfully, there's another widescreen resolution that's less taxing on your GPU (and wallet). A 19in TFT has a resolution of 1,440 x 900 (1.296 million pixels in total), while a normal 4:3 17in or 19in TFT has 1,280 x 1,024 pixels (1.31 million pixels in total); it's therefore easier on the GPU to generate an image for the native resolution of a 19in widescreen, as opposed to a 4:3 19in screen. You also benefit from the usual advantages of a widescreen monitor: it takes up more of your peripheral vision, making games more enjoyable, and offers more space for several windows next to each other. Widescreen is clearly the way to go, and if you can't afford the fancy high-resolution screens in the Labs, you may be interested in the two lower-res screens in Reviews.
While the Hannspree on the next page covers the quality end of the 19in TFT market, this Cibox is the cheapest 19in TFT we could find. Being 'the cheapest TFT we could find' is an odd claim to fame, much like being the best 'Police Academy' film or the most attractive female cage fighter. Our challenge while writing this review, therefore, is to avoid the phrase, 'for the money, it's...'
First off, we'll go through the looks and build quality - the usual stumbling blocks for a budget screen. For some reason, most budget screens are supported by flimsy plastic stands that have the vertical staying power of a drunk at his own stag party. Thankfully, the Cibox scores reasonably well for both styling and build quality. It looks fairly plain (unlike the frankly hideous fake wood front of the Hannspree) and is constructed from sturdy plastic. As the stand is fairly substantial, even heavy knocks to the bezel won't make the screen fall over.
The screen has one visual eccentricity, which you can see in the picture below. This panel of flowery leaves is positioned to the right of the bezel, and isn't too distracting. It indicates that the power button and OSD controls are located just behind. This is a nice way to adjust the contrast, brightness and other settings, as you hold the entire screen comfortably in your hand, pressing the paddle buttons to navigate the intuitive menu.
Although Cibox provides no information on the type of panel used in the C1905, we'd be surprised if it was anything other than a TN model, as this is the cheapest type of panel to make. Typically, TN panels provide narrow viewing angles but good response times. Sure enough, we saw little in the way of blur in fast-moving objects, but as TN has advanced as a technology, the viewing angle problem of old is unnoticeable until you view the screen from extremely low or high angles.
A typical TN panel isn't particularly punchy or vibrant, but neither is it over-vibrant or prone to colour-bias. The image we saw over the D-SUB connection (its only video input) was fairly unexceptional. It wasn't particularly vivid, but neither did images look bad in any colour-related way. Skin tones were natural, and images generally looked fine.
However, this is a cheap screen and, as such, there's one compromise of which you should be particularly aware: contrast. This screen is terrible at both ends of the light spectrum, but especially the high-end. Shadows lack detail, as the panel simply can't distinguish between pure black and a wide range of very dark greys. However, it's odd that the C1905 is even worse when trying to display details in brightly lit areas of an image. To try to compensate for this, we used a contrast setting of 46, but this made films look washed out, as if we were using an over-exposure effect to make every film look like a dream sequence. Increasing the contrast to 82 gave films their colour back, but then the colours in Windows looked too heavy, dark and foreboding. Somewhere around 60 is the compromise, but this means slightly washed-out colours in movies and slightly dark, off-putting colours in Windows. This is fine for an office environment, but not for your main home screen, and the 1W stereo speakers are pointlessly poor.
Conclusion
If you've reached this stage of the review, you've probably already made your mind up about the screen. We'll summarise quickly for you though. It's cheap, but it isn't of sufficient quality to use as your main screen. Perhaps as a secondary display for a media centre PC (for casual web browsing), it's a reasonably sound purchase - bizarrely, the cheapest 15in square TFT (with its cramped 1,024 x 768 resolution) costs around £15 more.
