LG Flatron W2486L review

With the advent of LED backlighting comes the obsession with creating the thinnest possible monitor. LG claims the W2486L is the world’s thinnest 24in PC monitor, but it’s a dubious honour.

In fact, the W2486L’s thinness creates more problems than advantages. One is the external power supply. Instead of a built-in power supply as most monitors have, LG has had to bundle a large black box with the W2486L as there was no room for it inside the casing. Also, the ports can’t face downwards as there’s not enough depth, meaning the cables stick out perpendicular to the screen. This isn’t very attractive if the rear of your monitor is on show.

Another gripe of form over function is the stand. It looks lovely with its red lozenge-like appearance, but it only has tilt adjustment (not height or pivot) and doesn’t prevent the screen wobbling when you touch the buttons. This leads us onto the next aggravation: the touch-sensitive controls.

We’ve never been fans of these, and for good reason. One is that they’re slow to respond, so you inevitably press them too many times and exit the menu before you’ve even entered it. The other reason is that there’s nothing for your fingers to feel, so you have to look where you’re prodding to make things happen.

Once you’re in the menus, there are all the settings you could want, including a proper colour temperature slider, including sRGB, plus control over the red, green and blue levels. A separate smart button provides access to automatic brightness, which works well. The Fun menu includes a Photo Effect setting, which lets you apply monochrome, sepia or Gaussian blur effects to the entire screen. We can’t see anyone wanting to use these, though.

Unusually, there are two HDMI inputs, a welcome addition if you have other devices like camcorders or games consoles. There’s also the usual VGA and DVI inputs, plus a minijack headphone output for audio coming in via HDMI. There are no built-in speakers, however.

Image quality is arguably the most important factor, and the W2486L proved a disappointment. The main problem was poor contrast, with a lack of both highlight and shadow detail. It’s possible that this is caused by the edge-mounted LEDs, although we had no complaints with the uniformity of the backlight. To alleviate the problem, we had to change gamma slider to the -50 setting and reduce contrast in order to differentiate white and grey, otherwise everything simply looked white. However, colours then looked dull and washed out. With no middle ground, we couldn’t find a setting where we were happy to compromise between colour and contrast.

Of course, once you factor in the steep £245 price, it’s all too easy to conclude that the W2486L is a monitor to avoid. Unless, that is, you’re only concerned with how your monitor looks and have lots of money to spend. If you don’t specifically need the world’s thinnest monitor, we recommend saving your money and choosing the marginally smaller 23in Philips 230C1HSB, which costs almost £100 less, yet has much better image quality.