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A stunning widescreen display
The Media Station looks almost as good as the screen
Masses of connection options

Flat panel TFT monitors have come a long way in the past few years. It was only about seven years ago that an 11in screen would have cost you over £10,000 and required a custom graphics card in order to display an image.

As time moved on the flat panel monitor became one of the most lusted after pieces of PC technology. Everyone wanted one but few could afford one. But through improved quality control and increased yield, along with a sprinkling of economies of scale the price has dropped considerably. You can now buy a great TFT flat panel for no more than you would have paid for a CRT a couple of years back.

Now that having a standard TFT panel on your desk is considered somewhat passé, many manufacturers are trying to rekindle the desire factor in potential buyers, and LG has really pushed the boat out.

The Flatron L2320A is quite simply a stunning looking display device. Even before turning it on you can’t help but stare at it. Resplendently finished in black and silver, this screen looks like it should be in a design museum, not sitting on a desk in an office. If LG has proved one thing, it’s that Apple isn’t the only manufacturer that can produce beautifully designed widescreen flat panels.

The screen area is 23in corner to corner presented in a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. This gives you a staggering native resolution of 1,920 x 1,200. You have to actually see a screen running in this resolution to appreciate it. You may be sitting there thinking that a 1,280 x 1,024 flat panel is perfectly fine and that you’d never need anything more, but you’d be wrong. Just half an hour sitting in front of this screen is enough to convince me that size, or at least resolution, really does matter.

The amount of information that you can display on screen with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 is amazing. You can have two Word documents open simultaneously for comparison, or just loads of windows to keep an eye on everything while you’re working on a specific task.

Of course you can only run the native resolution via an analogue D-SUB connection. If you want to connect digitally via DVI you’ll be limited to a maximum resolution of 1,600 x 1,200, assuming that your graphics card sports a 165MHz TMDS of course. It’s a bit of a shame that you can’t run the native resolution digitally, but the image through the D-SUB is still very good indeed. If you’re set on running a DVI signal the image is still good, although 1,600 x 1,200 is a 4:3 aspect ratio rather than a 16:9 so there is a certain amount of zooming involved.
There will also be some anti-aliasing employed since you’ll be running a resolution lower than the physical amount of pixels in the screen.
The image quality is superb with a high contrast and incredible viewing angle. Even with the amazingly high resolution there’s no sign of any dead pixels and the back lighting is even across the whole display.
Although there are still some hardcore gamers that refuse to use TFT screens because of latency issues, I had no problem playing games on this screen. Also the sheer size of the display makes playing games a totally immersive experience.

The rear of the screen looks pretty good too indicating that LG is expecting to see the L232A used in ‘front of house’ environments, where customers or clients will see the rear of the screen.

The sleek look at the rear is aided by the lack of connectors, but don’t be fooled into thinking that the L2320A isn’t versatile because it is.

Unlike most flat panels this one ships with an external Media Station that houses all the connections. The Media Station is very well specified for both PC and AV use. For PC connection you have an analogue D-SUB connector, a DVI-I port and a DVI-D port. For AV use there are the standard composite and S-Video inputs as well as RCA audio inputs. But to make things more interesting there are two sets of component video inputs as well. One set is specifically for an HDTV input, which is unfortunately redundant in Europe. But the other is for DVD players with component outputs. Unfortunately the DVD input only accepts a 480i signal rather than a progressive scan 480p one. This is a real shame since the HDTV input will accept a 720p progressive scan signal, but for DVD you’re stuck with an interlaced image. There are of course some very high end DVD players that will output a 720p progressive signal but they’re pretty thin on the ground.