HD Console Gaming

The prospect of inexpensive HD gaming on the Xbox 360 is what had us most excited about this monitor. Seeing as all other LCD HDTV's are fairly expensive (and relatively overpriced), this monitor offers 360 owners desperately in need of HD an inexpensive and quite competeny alternative.

To make it very clear, Xbox 360 owners who buy this monitor also have to buy the Xbox 360 VGA cable (MSRP $40) to connect the two. This monitor has no component inputs (similarily to the 2005FPW), so the VGA port is the only option. There has been plenty of confusion surrounding the functionality of this cable, but this cable is just as straight forward as using the regular composite/component cable that is provided with the basic system.

The VGA cable supports a very large variety of resolutions for running your Xbox 360 on a computer monitor (all the way up to 1280 x 1024 in fact), and the highest widescreen resolution it offers is 1360 x 768.

Though the AL1916W's native resolution is 1440 x 900, playing at 1360 x 768 was just fine. The Xbox Dashboard does not looks as crisp as it might were it running at the monitors standard resolution, but it is still well within the range of accepted sharpness.

What's interesting to note, is that while this monitor has no problem scaling oddly sized resolutions to fill its screen, the monitor cannot display 1280 x 720 without severe overscan issues. The right and left sides get cut off, and no amount of adjutment will bring the image within the bounds of the screen. This strikes us as odd, as the other 16:9 resolutions that the monitor supports scale themselves just fine to the limits of the screen.

Playing the 360 on this monitor is more than comfortable for extended periods, and is definitely playable from up to five or six feet away. We had no issues in relation to the image not being large enough. Even high-paced 4 player matches of Perfect Dark Zero are playable, although they will be physically tight, as most people will only be comfortable sitting two or three feet away from the screen.

The one issue we came across was in Project Gotham 3, but this is more a reflection on the game than the monitor. Because PGR3 upscales its image from only 600p when running widescreen resolutions, menus when viewed up close look slightly blocky and appear to have artifacting issues in the text that scrolls across each option. In game, this translates into jaggies popping up primarily on the car models themselves, detracting rather severely from the otherwise fully convincing (and by convincing, I do mean photo-realistic in the sense of tricking the eye for brief moments of time) environments. This has a reflection on the screen in that some screens tend to hide these jaggies better than others. Many HDTVs and LCD monitors have settings for adjusting sharpness, the lowering of which will smooth over some of the roughness, the AL1916W on the other hand, has no such feature.

For primarily single player or Xbox Live gaming, this screen will serve fantastically. For those 360 owners currently playing on a standard PC monitor, the switch to widescreen would be worth it almost on its own (as there wouldn't be any form of resolution gain from switching to this monitor from a standard PC monitor). Again, playing a primarily dark game like Condemned on this screen would not be recommended, but most everything else will look great.