[silkstone]

As title. I have one of these and like it. (Unlike the Samsung 2232BW, you don't take pot luck on which panel they fit.)

Micro Direct's price of £171.54 inc VAT is pretty keen.

LG 22" L226WTQ PF MonitorWidescreen DVI 2ms Gloss Black 5000:1 Tilt (3yr Manufacturer's Warranty) - No Code Available - www.microdirect.co.uk

[Sonsey]

How do you find it compared to the Samsung Silky (once both were calibrated)?

[silkstone]

The Samsung is on the Windows machine and I calibrated it using Spyder3. It has what's known as the 'C' panel - not as good as the 'S' panel which is actually made by Samsung. It's a lottery which you get. The C Panel has a noticeably cool/bluish cast.

I'm not normally a fan of software profilers, but I had unusual difficulty getting neutral greys throughout the tonal range by tweaking the graphics card settings, so in the end I resorted to the Spyder. The final result is perfectly OK - the black and white points are fine, and the balance is reasonably neutral throughout the range. Subjectively the image quality is very good.

The LG monitor is on my Linux machine. At the default settings it was much better than the Samsung had been with defaults - no obvious cast and fairly neutral, but the brightness was too high (as usual with these things) and the white point was wrong - lighter tones were lost.

I adjusted it using nvidia-settings which is like the graphics card settings you get on Windows. (You can alter brightness, contrast and gamma for each channel.) I then switched on the Windows machine and let the Samsung screen warm up, and displayed the same image full-screen on both.

The two looked exactly the same, within a gnat's.

So after a very long answer, the short version is that the LG was much better straight out of the box, and was quite easy to calibrate manually. The Samsung was quite poor at default settings, and was difficult to tweak. In the end it cost me an extra £100 for a Spyder3, and it was £30 more than the LG to start with.

Having said all that, if you're lucky and get an 'S' panel in the Samsung, they are supposed to be very good. Unfortunately there's no way of telling from the serial number - you have to find out from the on-screen display by pressing an odd series of buttons, so they obviously don't really want you to know!

[Sonsey]

Thanks for that Silky... sounds like the LG is a good priced option in the 22" market.

[silkstone]

Yes, I reckon so.

The graphics card settings you need for manual calibration will vary from one machine to another, but in case it helps anyone here are mine for the LG L226WTQ...

RED
Brightness: 0.054
Contrast: 0
Gamma: 0.850

GREEN
Brightness: 0
Contrast: 0
Gamma: 0.830

BLUE
Brightness: -0.050
Contrast: 0
Gamma: 0.850

Those are with the monitor controls set to Brightness 100 and Contrast 60.