Personal

I have a new monitor

LG 1730B

Two days ago I bought LG 1730B (full name is 1730BSNH), beautiful silver 17" TFT monitor.

While you can check the specs at the LG site, it is hard to translate them into real experience. How colours really look like, display quality, how eyes react to …

I prefer to keep my sight as long as possible, so I was never saving on monitors. I had 17" CRT monitor, exceptional Belinea 103070. I bought it 5 years ago and it supports 1280x1024@85Hz and 1600x1200@75Hz. The visible size was slightly less than 16" and the highest resolution I could use for text-editing/coding was 1152x864.

I intentionally passed the first few waves of price drops and waited for things to mature. This panel has 12ms response time, which should be more than enough for fast-paced games, as well as regular work.

As expected, the colours are different and subtle differences (like #fff and #f5f5f5) are almost impossible to notice. It has calibration options, although I usually don’t go through that. I’m lazy. :)

Display stability is amazing even with 75Hz for screen refresh. Monitor auto-adjusts the resolution to optimal settings on a single button click. It has numerous options to fine-tune the display, but auto works perfectly. It also has day and night modes for text, movie and photo.

The swivel is great. Panel can be moved up/down and back/front so it can be positioned any way you like it.

All in all, after two days of work, I’m more than happy with it. TFT 17" has larger visible area than CRT counterpart, so I can now freely use 1280x1024 - pixels are not to small.