LG Flatron L245WP review

This LG display is aimed at those who want more desktop real estate, 'Full HD' support and to make their PC-using neighbours jealous. It purportedly has more bells, whistles and tricks up its sleeve than equivalent monitors -- plus it's made by the people who bought you the ultra-stylish LG Fantasy series. But is it really as good as it seems?

Strengths
Like most 24-inch monitors, the Flatron L245WP is a welcome sight on your desk. In particular we like the thin screen bezel and the glossy, piano-black base section, which lets you rotate the monitor on its horizontal axis. As a bonus, the rear hinge lets you flip between portrait and landscape modes.

There's an impressive array of inputs on the L245WP. It has HDMI, composite and D-Sub, which cover most of the popular input formats you might need in a monitor. The screen has an integrated USB hub that provides two USB ports on the left, along with a headphone jack so you don't have to rely on a headphone extension cable trailing to your desktop PC.

LG has chosen not to use the touch-sensitive control buttons seen on the Fantasy series, instead opting for mechanical buttons located on the underside of the bottom-right bezel. These are clearly labelled on the forward-facing part of the bezel, and the on-screen menu system is fairly logical to navigate.

Image quality on the L245WP is stunning. After putting it through its paces in DisplayMate, we have to conclude this is one of the best monitors we've come across. It was able to differentiate between subtly different dark and light tones, and its colour reproduction is about as good as we've seen.

Video playback was impressive, too. We fed it Blu-ray and HD DVD flicks from a PC using LG's own Super Multi Blue GGW-H10N player and we couldn't find much to fault. It looks about as good in motion as it does displaying static images, with vibrant colours and little blurring to speak of.

Movies encrypted with HDCP encryption also played fine, which is reassuring -- there's nothing worse than getting an error message because your monitor doesn't support copy-protected video.

Weaknesses
Why on earth LG only bundles a D-Sub cable is a mystery. You're already paying hundreds of pounds for the screen, so it surely can't have harmed the company's fortunes to include an HDMI cable, or at the very least a DVI cable with an HDMI adaptor.

The L245WP's Picture-in-Picture mode lets you watch video from two sources simultaneously. As handy as this is, it's not ideal for watching HD movies while you tinker with an Excel spreadsheet. The video window has a tendency to tear, or become jerky, which can reduce your enjoyment somewhat.

Our final gripe with the L245WP is minor. The screen has a tendency to wobble on its hinge when provoked. Luckily this only becomes an issue if you live in an earthquake zone, or if your desk is physically joined to that of a hyperactive colleague.

Conclusion
The L245WP is a fantastic monitor. It's not cheap, sure, but it delivers excellent image quality, is attractive to look at and has the advantage of being fully HD Ready.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield