LG W1954TQ review

If you’re looking for a budget monitor for an entry-level PC, a 19in display, such as LG’s W1954TQ, will be attractive.

It looks good for the price, with a curvy, glossy finish that makes it feel a lot less severe and businesslike than other monitors.

Choosing a 19in display rather than a 20in (or higher) model may save you a few pounds, but you end up with a lower resolution of 1,440×900. This is still perfectly acceptable for work or watching movies, but we prefer the 1,680×1,050 or 1,920×1,080 of larger monitors.

The W1954TQ has an HDCP-compliant DVI port, so connecting a Blu-ray player or games console is easy with an HDMI-to-DVI adaptor. You’ll need to connect the PC with the VGA input if you do this, though.

Image quality was good and the settings needed little tweaking from the defaults. The backlight is even, and colours were reasonably accurate. We noticed some banding in our colour gradient tests, however, and the colours were less vibrant than those of other monitors here. This is likely to be due to the screen’s matte finish, which prevents reflections at the expense of colour intensity and contrast. Even so, flesh tones seemed particularly lifeless.

Adjusting the picture can be tricky. The touch-sensitive controls aren’t very sensitive, and there’s a delay between pressing a button and the response, which makes navigating menus difficult. What’s more, the menus are confusingly laid out and options are duplicated throughout the submenus.

The menus don’t even give you full control over every feature. To access some settings you must install the ForteManager software, which didn’t like our Windows 7 PC. We don’t think a monitor should have settings that you can only adjust through additional software.

We could live with these faults if the monitor was cheaper, but you can buy better, bigger monitors with higher resolutions for a similar price. We’d rather have BenQ’s 22in G2220HD, which has a full HD resolution and costs only slightly more.