Digital Trends

LG L1981Q

March 14th, 2006 | by Ian Bell

LG ships the L1981Q in an incredibly small box which includes a single handle for carrying much like you would a briefcase. Unlike a lot of monitors which are shipped in separate pieces (usually the screen must be attached to the neck and base) our L1981Q was neatly folded and taped into place (so the screen would not spring open when pulled from the box). We simply removed the tape and pivoted the screen into position. The AC adapter is built into part of the power cord much like you would see on a laptop system, so if you find the box a little too large, you should be able to hide it if you are creative enough; we didn’t think it was too much of a bother though. 

Once the monitor was plugged in, we moved forward with calibrating it. As mentioned, there are only three buttons for adjusting settings, and they are heat sensitive to your touch. You have the main menu/OSD (on-screen display) button on the left, the power button in the middle and the auto-set button on the right. We found this to be a huge problem. The controls are so sensitive that we often turned off the monitor while trying to access the menu, or we would hit the auto-set button while trying to turn off the monitor – at which it would mess up our settings. LG should have put the power button in a completely different spot than the other two. We commend them for trying something different in using the heat sensitive buttons, but they were just integrated poorly. 

Because of the L1981Q’s native resolution of 1280x1024 it’s not the best LCD for gaming, you would be better off upgrading to a 20-inch 4:3 aspect ratio monitor so you can get that utopian 1600x1200 resolution which gamers love. Other than that, we found that the L1981Q did a good job in our gaming tests. Because of its low 8ms response rate we experience little if any ghosting while playing the games Half-Life 2 and Call of Duty 2. DVD movies also looked great and black levels looked above average despite only having a 500:1 contrast ratio (those figures are often over-rated anyways). Text both in Microsoft Word and while surfing the web, looked sharp and true with good bright white backgrounds being produced. In our photography tests, we found the brightness to be somewhat uneven with some areas of the screen appearing brighter than others. There was no light bleeding affects on the edges of the screen like you would see on some laptop displays though.

Image Courtesy of LG Electronics