LED Backlight Makes 21-Inch LCD Movie-Star Gorgeous...And Equally Distant

My screen favorite isn't Brad Pitt or Naveen Andrews. It's the NEC MultiSync LCD2180WG-LED, the first LCD monitor we've seen that uses LED backlighting. The LCD industry has been buzzing with talk about LED (short for light-emitting diode) backlights, saying that they'll deliver evenly bright screens and a wide color gamut along with the environmental virtuousness of a mercury-free LCD monitor. (You can find the backstory in "Improve the Look of Your LCD.") We gave this professional model a spin to check out the screen-quality claims.



In the PC World Test Center, we set the LCD2180WG-LED next to our 19-inch baseline unit to see how the LED model would do against a monitor with conventional backlighting. Even before I calibrated the LED model, it showed more accurate flesh tones on our DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl than we'd seen on an LCD monitor before. A resident CRT loyalist admitted that the color looked awfully good, although the usual LCD motion artifacting still got to him.

I spent a few minutes calibrating the LCD2180WG-LED with the $400 SpectraView color calibration software-and-puck set before looking at some Alaska vacation photos. The difference was a real eye-opener. Flesh tones still looked realistic and correctly shaded, without the mask-like effect you sometimes see. What really knocked me out, though, was its expertise in handling areas of extreme dark and light. Most LCD monitors have trouble showing detail in dark and light areas simultaneously. The LCD2180WG-LED, however, showed the nuances of snowy Mount McKinley while making a black zipper and black zipper pull stand out from a black jacket. Our baseline LCD, though generally good, showed less natural flesh tones, and it couldn't get both the darks and the lights to show full detail at the same time.

LEDs backlights may be the next big trend in LCD monitors. I'd be happy to see that--especially if increased volume allows for more design development and lower prices. Unusually thick for an LCD and boxy in design, the LCD-2180WG-LED doesn't catch the eye when the power's off. And although the screen's a knockout, so's the price: $6,750.00. For a high-powered graphics professional, perhaps that's worth it. We average folks will just have to wait until the decimal moves a few places to the left.