LG Flatron W2252TQ

Verdict:

Read the papers and you might think there are worrying times ahead, but LG is still proudly proclaiming 'Life's Good' at every available opportunity. Indeed, it might just be if all the claims made about the £150 Flatron W2252TQ turn out to be true. It looks sleek and distinctly TV-like, while a 10,000:1 contrast ratio and a button labelled 'Fun' are intriguing inclusions in a 22in widescreen costing so little.

THE STAND

Costs have certainly been saved here. There's no height adjustment, swivel or rotation, and you can't turn the panel independently of the base, all of which makes it tricky to connect your DVI or D-SUB cable (no other input options are included).

We had trouble assembling the stand, too - a firm whack was needed to make the parts click into place. Still, once constructed, the stand complements the black shiny plastic aesthetics of the screen, with the curved plastic of the bezel and silver swoosh under the screen giving it living-room good looks.

FUN BUTTON

If LG is trying to cut costs by using a basic stand, the Fun button is an odd inclusion. Pressing it opens a four-option menu, and we immediately went to the Sound option to turn off the irritating mini-jingle that a speaker plays whenever you press any button.

The '4:3 in Wide' option lets you set the screen to a 4:3 aspect ratio, squashing a 1,680 x 1,050 desktop in a rather pointless way. 'Photo Effect' is equally weird, as it makes your screen sepia, monochrome or applies a Gaussian blur to the entire screen.

The latter option is like adding over-the-top HDR and over-bright effects to everything the LG displays. As the electronics powering the Fun button must add to the overall cost of the LG, yet provide little benefit, we wonder why the button is present at all.

SCREEN SETUP

By now, we'd become familiar with the TN panel of the LG. It's well set up by default, although we had to tweak the contrast to 75, and preferred the default 6,500k colour temperature to sRGB. The OSD options are limited to basic controls - brightness, contrast, colour temperature, individual colour intensities and little else - and the control buttons on the lower right-hand edge of the bezel aren't intuitive to use. However, a few minutes of concentration when applying your settings and you won't need to venture near them again.

IMAGE QUALITY

Once the settings were applied, we found that the panel's performance was surprisingly good. The use of four CCFL light tubes gives the screen a very even backlight, and little light leaks into the screen from the edges. While we couldn't make the LG's whites truly white, our colour scale tests showed vibrant colours at the bright end of the scale that faded evenly to black at the other - shadows and brightly lit portions of scenes shouldn't, therefore, suffer from unwanted tinting.

The LG struggles to handle bright colours perfectly, but darker shades are well reproduced. Lifeless shadows are likely to irk you more than a loss of detail in brightly lit portions of an image, so LG makes the right compromise when it comes to contrast.

10,000:1 CONTRAST RATIO?

The need to compromise comes from the fact that the panel's static contrast ratio is 700:1, boosted to 10,000:1 by dimming and brightening the backlight. We were worried that the LG would have to make annoyingly frequent changes to its backlight to achieve such a high dynamic range, but we saw little evidence that the backlight was changing at all while testing.

TESTING

We were also happy to see the skin tones of 'Fellowship of the Ring' and our test photos shown with such sympathy - colours are realistically neutral whether you're looking at Liv Tyler's pale, elfin face or the rosy-cheeked grin of a friend photographed down the pub. Equally pleasing was the level of detail in shadows and the blackness of dark portions of images - dark folds of clothing looked just as they should, for example.

GAMING PERFORMANCE

The main strength of a TN panel is its tight pixel response times, and we saw little blur during the more frenetic moments of the film or when gaming. Race Driver: GRID (with its motion blur effect disabled) was crisp, attesting to the LG's 2ms pixel response time, and night races looked particularly attractive thanks to the vibrant colours of the neon streetlights.

A typical weakness of TN technology is narrow viewing angles, but the viewing angles are generous on this screen. The LG's picture remained stable when viewed from any angle horizontally, with the vertical viewing angle approaching 170 degrees.

CONCLUSION

The Flatron W2252TQ offers as good a level of performance as a panel of this size can for its price. The slightly murky whites and the lack of fine control of brightly lit portions of images aren't enough to put us off, as the overall image quality is very good.

We saw vibrant colours that looked realistic throughout testing, and these were helped by plenty of detail in shadows and dark areas of images. The Fun button is pure gimmick and almost entirely pointless, but after a few minutes with the OSD, you realise that you have a very good screen at a very affordable price.

You can buy the LG Flatron W2252TQ for £150.05 from Dabs (price correct at time of review)

For more information on the W2252TQ, please visit LG's website

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