Introduction

Over the past few years, large TV's have made the switch almost exclusively to High Definition formats. With the coming of the HD era, widescreen TV's whether projection or LCD, have become the standard for watching movies and more and more general TV as well with many stations offering HD counterparts to their programming.

On the PC side though, almost all monitors on the market currently come in the usual 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratio that we have been using for years. Dell has been a major factor in bringing widescreen LCD's to prominence with their 20xxFPW lineup of monitors, but even the most inexpensive of those can be had on average for about $450 after rebates. This may not seem like much to the enthusiast, but for the average gamer, that is a fairly large chunk of change to lay down when a very gaming capable, standard aspect ratio, 19 inch LCD can be had for about $200 less. For enthusiasts, the Widescreen Gaming Forum has been a home to many dedicated widescreen users, who work at contributing to an extremely large knowledge base and providing tips for running an ever growing library of games in widescreen resolutions.

While fantastic, WGF does not represent the majority of potential monitor buyers - the mainstream. We have for review today the first of what will surely be a wave of widescreen LCD's aimed directly at people (and gamers for sure) who need very solid performance for not alot of money, but most of all would like to make the switch to widescreen.

While we don't generally do reviews of displays, the signficance of this monitor was too great for us to let it slip by. We have teamed up with NCIX to bring you a review of what we expect will be an extremely popular product. We will be running this monitor on different games and testing subjectively for basic color uniformity, black levels, and ghosting etc against a variety of different monitors both CRT and LCD, including Dells own 2005FPW 20 inch widescreen monitor. However, you will probably find the most interesting aspect of our review on page six.

With the Xbox 360 released last month, there is undoubtedly a massive group of brand new Xbox owners, frantically looking for an inexpensive HD solution as they realise the benefits of the higher resolution. We will be running this monitor off an Xbox 360 to determine whether this is a viable solution for those who need HD, and need it now, without sacrificing much in the way of quality, or their wallets.

This is not going to be a very scientific review, and is therefore not catered towards diehard display enthusiasts, but will undoubtedly be helpful for those wondering if this monitor is worth it for general computer use and gaming.