Well, the monitor was delivered to my work a couple of days ago but I sent it back after a few hours of use. Why? Well, for a start the power button was "wonky", it stuck at a real upward angle and looked completely mis-alligned compared to the rest of the buttons, too annoying to bear. I couldn't seem to fix it either. On top of this although the monitor had no dead pixels, it did have some bleed in the lower left corner, and while it wasn't major, NEC have a zero bleed policy and I figure if im going to pay 420 notes for something then it had better be bloody well perfect. So, waiting for a swap out on Monday hopefully!
However the good news... I did test it for a good few hours and here's my opinion... it looks ****-hot. I'd never seen a 20.1" widescreen in the flesh before and wow it is REALLY wide, I can imagine all games that support it looking completely bloomin' awesome on it and can't wait to fire some up!
Colour reproduction and blacks, again wow, I never imagined it would be that good. Blacks are deep and velvetty, yes gents that means "CRT black", as if the screen were off, simply amaying. With no tweaking whatsoever the colours also looked fantastic, rich and even. The monitor also has a feature called "Advanced DV" and this further dims the backlight to create greater contrast and colour depth, it also adjusts intelligently depending on what you are viewing. White text pages will dim to reduce glare, and dark pages will do the opposite. From what I saw it really looks to be a top feature of this monitor.
The OSD options are many and highly tweakable, for those that can't abide "stretching" in games that won't work with widescreen, the monitor scaled down to 1280*1024 on a 1:1 pixel resolution, meaning no blur whatsoever, razor sharp.
I fired up MOH (our work LAN game of choice) and with a eye beadier than that of Sauron I strafed about like a loon and popped off a few guards. Ghosting is something i've always imagined with horror, a bit like waking up with your friends fat mother. However I am happy to report that in the 15 minutes I played it I, a fussy sod at the best of times, detected no noticeable ghosting whatsoever, and only minimal "blur" which is inevitable. It's a **** fast screen, and I can't wait to play away on it.
One last note the screen is very reflective, you will not to be able to use it with a light source facing it, it's best viewed in darkness or with a lamp behind the monitor and you'll be fine. For you WOW players who live in airless pits and last saw daylight a year or two ago this will not bother you
Just a few thoughts for you there, and provided the monitor I receive next week has a straight button and no bleed then there will be a review coming your way soon...
and your example and pictures I've seen from other monitors around (even from the new Viewsonic VX2025) are even worst than the worst one submitted for NEC. Positive thing is that no dead pixels are reported for now. This is the major reason why I'm advising people not to make any drastic steps at the beginning and just give the monitor a few days (as there is high possibility that "slight backlight bleed" effect will fade away, anyhow). If effect is unbearable, they are covered by NEC "backlight free" panel state so no problems for RMA there.
So much so I am half tempted to get one myself !
