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A person who watches many DVDs will benefit from having this widescreen monitor, as the picture can be larger, filling up a much larger portion of the screen than with a monitor that has a 4:3 aspect ratio. While movies do not fill up the entire screen, they go all the way across horizontally, which covers a larger area than a regular 17 inch LCD. The lack of vertical space does not pose a problem for widescreen movies. That being said, when you rent/buy your movies, make sure you get the widescreen version, as the full screen version will completely defeat the purpose of having the widescreen monitor for watching movies and will make the picture much smaller.
While the monitor’s performance is excellent on DVDs, die-hard gamers may be disappointed. As most games will not support 1280x768, one must play them at 1024x768. The monitor exhibits different behavior depending on the game. When games are horizontally stretched, they appear distorted, though with fast-paced games such as Unreal Tournament 2003 this did not impede playing and was not very noticeable. With full screen games that are not as fast, however, such as strategy games, the distortion can be more easily seen (especially when circles are made somewhat elliptical). If the game is compressed to a 4:3 aspect ratio, vertical black bars appear on the side, and the size of the screen used to play the game is greatly reduced. While DVI performance was phenomenal, using the monitor with an Analog cable/video card did result in some flickering/ghosting with fast-paced games.
The built in speakers on the monitor were not very loud, even when the volume was raised. The speakers would be adequate if the monitor was used in a business environment, but for movies and games, better speakers would give a better experience. Next Page: Conclusion |
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