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A newcomer to the UK market, NFREN says it will be my ‘new friend’ and that I will enjoy my life and create an exiting future with its products. A bold if somewhat awkwardly translated statement, but let’s find out if the NF-1500MAEP will become my new buddy.

My first impressions are of a functional design with no overly fancy styling. The silver-coloured plastic chassis doesn’t feel very solid to the touch and can be heard to creak in places when you’re tilting the screen back. The bezel, however, is pleasantly narrow along the top although it does widen down the sides to accommodate the rather weak 2W stereo speakers. This gives the 1500MAEP a widescreen appearance, even though the TFT panel is a standard 4:3 15in model. The square-based stand is relatively large and gives the whole unit plenty of stability. The panel itself slides onto two tilting prongs and is secured in place with a couple of bolts.

Around the back you’ll find a number of ports that give you strong clues as to the functionality of this unit. Besides a standard D-SUB port you also get an S-Video port, although this is incorrectly labelled as S-VHS. Next to this is a composite video port and left and right RCA jacks for stereo sound. There are also two 3.5in jacks for audio in and out if you want to hook up your PC’s audio and a pair of headphones, respectively. Access to these is pretty unhindered, but the D-SUB port and power connector are positioned far too close to each other.

If you haven’t already guessed what sort of LCD the 1500MAEP is, then the final port will give it away. This is an antenna socket for plugging in your aerial cable so that the built in TV-tuner can translate the signal and ultimately display your favourite programs onscreen.

So, what we have here is a 15in TFT display that doubles up as a television. But is it any good? After installing the driver and the ICM profile, I tested for picture quality using Displaymate and ran through the test screens. Geometry is faultless, as is the case with all TFT panels, but colour performance was not so consistent. Whereas colour purity for red, green and blue test screens are evenly illuminated, the more sensitive colour scale test revealed distinct compression at the dark end of the colour spectrums. Out of the 25 intensities for each of the 10 principal colours at least two steps could be seen to merge into one dark block. Not a good sign if you want the best performance for colour balance and contrast. I also noticed that the overall colour temperature of the panel seemed skewed toward the cooler end of the scale. Even at the warmer setting of 5000K the picture still had a slight bluish tone. Of course you can select the user option in the OSD and spend some time manually fine-tuning the RGB channels, but it was still quite difficult to get the right tonal balance particularly when assessing skin tones in our test image and DVD movie.

The OSD also carries a couple of gamma settings – a ‘linear’ one that’s basically the default TFT setting where no colour correction has been applied to the picture, and a ‘CRT’ one that darkens the midtones relative to the light and dark areas. Banding was also apparent across the 256-intensity level test screen, which should normally show a smooth degradation from black to white.

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