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HP L2335 LCD Review

Step Aside Apple...

by Josh Walrath

            HP is surprisingly honest, and in fact a little conservative with their specifications of this product.  Let’s take a quick glance.

            Offhand we can look at other competing products like the Dell 2405 FPW and see that the Dell monitor has better overall specifications (such 1000:1 contrast, better viewing angle, and 500 nits brightness).  The only obvious area that the HP excels at over the Dell is that of dot pitch.  Since the Dell shares the same resolution, but a larger viewing area, the dot pitch for the Dell is at .27 mm vs. the .258 mm on the HP.  This subtle difference actually makes the HP easier to look at when running at non-native resolutions. 

Qualitative Analysis

            I was a bit skeptical at first when changing from a 22” Viewsonic P225F (aperture grille, fine dp, excellent colors, etc.) to a LCD monitor, as my previous experiences with older LCD’s made me leery of gaming and photo editing.  My fears were soon eased once I set the monitor up and booted my computer.

The contents are pretty minimalist, but HP does include a quick view sheet, a full manual, driver and auto-adjustment CD, as well as both a DVI and VGA cable.  Pay no attention to the kitchen rugs.

            Clean is a word you can use to describe the effect of going from an older CRT to a new LCD.  Text becomes very sharp and easy to read, and there is no sign of blur.  Colors seem a bit more vibrant, contrast is really good, and whites just seem more white than on my older CRT.  Brightness was good as well, and I found it far easier to sit in front of this LCD than any CRT for hours on end.

            Gaming on this monitor is pure luxury.  The wide aspect viewing allows games to be played at 1920 x 1200.  Games such as Half Life 2 (and its derivatives), Fable: The Lost Chapters, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, and many other titles offer native 1920 x 1200 resolutions, and all of them look very nice, especially when paired with a high end video card that can push those types of pixels.  When running other applications which either have no support for 1920 x 1200, or are just too performance intensive (read F.E.A.R.) then this monitor scales very well down to lower resolutions with few of the problems that typical LCD’s have.  Running F.E.A.R. at 1024 x 768 with 4X AA gave a very nice experience.  I did not notice any of the strange blurring or pixelization that is typically found with LCD’s running at non-native resolutions.  Much of this can be attributed to the finer dot pitch that this LCD has, but it also has to do with the circuitry inside effectively routing pixel information at non-native resolutions.  There is also very minimal image smear when running fast paced games.  In fact, even playing the fastest first person shooter I did not notice any appreciable image smear, and it did not affect my gameplay performance in any way.

            Movies are seemingly made for such a monitor.  Do not expect this LCD to replace the living room TV though, as the viewing angle is not nearly as good as one would hope.  About 45 degrees from perpendicular is about the most a user can handle without the display starting to lose brightness and color accuracy.  This is typically not a problem with a user sitting right in front of the LCD, or two people sitting about 5 feet back and watching a movie.  Putting this LCD in a home theater situation would really be a futile endeavor.  Other than the viewing angle, I found DVD and WMV reproduction on this screen to be nearly flawless.  Every once in a while I would see a little bit of tearing, but it was quite rare.  This may be more of a factor of what codec was being used rather than LCD performance.  For example, using an ATI Radeon X1800 XT with the Catalyst 5.13 drivers and PowerDVD 6.0, I achieved probably the best DVD playback quality I have yet seen.  When playing back a H.264 720p trailer on Quicktime I did not achieve quite as good results (some tearing and a dropped frame or two).  Again, this could very well be more of a factor of the playback software and video card drivers.

In a very smart move, HP included a quick setup sheet on the LCD itself.  The user really should read this closely before attaching and powering up the LCD.  The tape holding this was easy to take off and left no residue on the silver bezel.

            The best movie results will be through the use of a PC connected to the DVI output.  The Component inputs are good for attaching an external DVD player or HDTV cable controller, but it may not scale the image as nicely as a PC with a solid video card and good drivers.  Still, the image is outstanding with both DVI and Component.  S-Video and Composite give lower quality results, but the scaling on this monitor does help to clean up the images somewhat.

            Photo editing is simply a dream with this monitor.  Brightness, color, and contrast all seem perfectly balanced to give an outstanding editing session.  The one minor flaw that I have seen, but only after really looking for it, was that some grays have a slight pink hue when displayed on this screen.  This really is only noticeable when a user sits down to really look for it.

            Blacks are well represented, but not as good as some other LCD’s.  Only when a pure black screen is shown does the user notice that a mottled pattern exists across the screen.  There are areas where the backlight is leaking through a bit more than others.  This really is only apparent when using a pure black background.  In games, even those such as Doom 3 and Quake 4 (which are generally quite dark) I did not notice any brightness problems or areas that did not appear black to me during the action.  While perfection would be nice here, I found that it is not annoying when running desktop applications, movies, or games.

Next: More Impressions

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