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LG Flatron M228WD 22in Monitor & TV Tuner Review

Author Edward Chester
Published 26th Mar 2008
Manufacturer LG Electronics
Price £217.39 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed £250.00 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price Click here
Design & Features Score 9 for Design & Features
Image Quality Score 6 for Image Quality
Sound Quality Score 4 for Sound Quality
Value Score 7 for Value
Overall Score 7 for Overall
LG Flatron M228WD 22in Monitor & TV Tuner
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The same ease of use is present when actually using the M228WD as a TV. Everything is easy to control, changing channels is very quick, and the EPG is comprehensive and easy to use. Moreover, all this is complemented by what has to be one of the best OSD's I've seen on either a monitor or TV. Menus are well labelled, intuitively laid out and respond quickly to commands, making getting where you need and doing what you need incredibly quick and easy.

All the usual options are there including contrast, brightness and colour temperature settings. There's also a selection of Picture Modes that are basically just profiles that contain values for all the other settings. You can choose from Dynamic, Standard, Mild, and one of two user profiles. The Standard and Mild modes essentially adjust contrast and brightness to give a brighter or more subdued image respectively, and the two user profiles enable you to create a couple of your own setups that you can recall at the touch of a button. The interesting one, though, is Dynamic, which uses LG's Digital Fine Contrast (DFC) to dynamically adjust contrast during video playback.


Now this isn't a dynamic backlight adjustment, as seen on many newer LCD TVs, but rather DFC just digitally adjusts the signal to boost contrast. As a consequence of this, it doesn't really seem to do much, or at least nothing of merit. If anything it just seems to saturate colours more so dark areas appear darker and light areas appear lighter. However, in doing so it loses detail in these areas and, perhaps even more concerning, compression artefacts in video are highlighted even more. Essentially, our advice would be to leave this setting off.

Of course, being a TV, the OSD has a whole host of other options for the tuner, including programme management (for renaming or removing channels from the channel list) and CI information. There's also plenty of options for the inbuilt speakers, including a quite mind-boggling array of Sound Modes (Surround MAX, Standard, Music , Movie, Sports, User - we'd recommend sticking to standard) and the option to turn the speakers completely off.

Unfortunately, while the M228WDs features, ease of use, and performance are superb, the same can't be said for its sound or image quality whether used as a TV or monitor.

 

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