LG 77M

...a 17” monitor, produced by LG Electronics. It was purchased by the IT Department about 2 years ago, for a user who was slightly short sighted and demanded a larger monitor on her desk!

The unit was purchased for around £200, but as with most technology prices tend to come down so the monitor will probably be available for less than this price now.


Specs
This monitor will support resolutions from 640 x ...
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The LG 77M monitor is white in colour, with blue side panels. These panels are actually a blue woven material, so I would imagine that beneath these sit the speakers.

The screen is FST, so while it is not totally flat, it is still flat enough to deflect most glare. In addition the screen is given a CDT coating which should ensure it is anti-glare, anti-reflection and anti-static. Well in theory anyway!

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This monitor is currently sitting unused in the store room of the IT Department, but I reckon it’s still worth a review from yours truly!

This is a 17” monitor, produced by LG Electronics. It was purchased by the IT Department about 2 years ago, for a user who was slightly short sighted and demanded a larger monitor on her desk!

The unit was purchased for around £200, but as with most technology prices tend to come down so the monitor will probably be available for less than this price now.

Specs
This monitor will support resolutions from 640 x 480, up to 1280 x 1024. It will support up to 1024 x 768 in flicker free mode. It is plug and play compatible and will function with PC and Mac computers.

The monitor will support stereo sound as it is equipped with a built in stereo amplifier and twin speakers. The amplifier and speakers combine to give a maximum output of 5 watts per side.

An on screen menu is provided to alter the monitor settings. The menus feature the following functions: H/V size and position, side pincushion, trapezoid, moiré, colour temperature, colour curve, RGB levels, image zoom and tilt, mode recall, manual degaussing, OSD timer, audio treble/bass/volume and microphone input select. In addition to this the front panel also provides brightness and contrast controls.

This monitor is quite a large unit. The dimensions are 18.3” x 17.4” x 17.1”, and it weighs in at a hefty 19.5kg. All in all, this makes shifting the unit around quite a task!

The LG 77M monitor is white in colour, with blue side panels. These panels are actually a blue woven material, so I would imagine that beneath these sit the speakers.

The screen is FST, so while it is not totally flat, it is still flat enough to deflect most glare. In addition the screen is given a CDT coating which should ensure it is anti-glare, anti-reflection and anti-static. Well in theory anyway!

In Use
The monitor is plug and play compatible, so it has no problems in picking up the display cards of any of our PCs in the office. I linked this monitor up to a 2.4 GHz Fujitsu Siemens computer running Windows 2000 and had no compatibility problems.

The unit itself, because of its size, will take up a large amount of room on a desk and tends to dominate it rather. So this factor should be considered if you are a person who only has a limited amount of space for a monitor!

Switching the monitor on, the screen itself seems reasonably large, especially if you are used to working with a 15” display, like I am. The actual quality is good, with images appearing bright and crisp on the screen.

The monitor will support a wide range of resolutions, but it must be considered that not all of these will be flicker free. I ran this monitor using a 1024 x 768 display, which is its limit for flicker free display. This seemed to give a good performance, it didn’t make images and icons appear too blocky or blurred on the screen, also the images were not too small, as can be the case sometimes with running high resolution settings in Windows. The on screen colour definition was also respectable, and on the whole I was reasonably impressed with the screen image.

The on-screen menus provided on the monitor are easy to navigate using the selection buttons on the front of the monitor casing. As set out above, there are a wide range of different settings available to be adjusted. However, it’s probably not a good idea to fiddle around with them too much if you don’t know what you are doing, or the screen will appear very strange indeed!

This monitor has a stereo amplifier and speakers built into it. This is becoming the norm these days for a lot of monitors, as we have moved away from the days of mono (or no sound!) on computers, to multi-media equipped machines. Due to this, I guess it makes sense for manufacturers to move with the times and equip their screens with stereo capabilities. I ran an output from the PC’s sound card to the monitor to test the sound quality. Overall, I found the speakers to provide a decent performance level, with a reasonable amount of bottom end and definition to the sound quality. Also, being able to adjust the treble and bass settings from the monitor’s on screen menu is a useful addition.

Reliability wise, this monitor was used for about 18 months by the user without encountering any problems. It was recently swapped over for a 17” TFT monitor, so had nothing to do with the actual performance of the monitor, it just took up too much room! In the past I have found the LG Electronics products to be of a decent quality, so I would imagine this monitor would have run reliably for a good while before needed to be replaced.

Conclusion
This is a good value monitor, if you can pick one up. It has a good screen image, decent sound quality and proves reliable performance. The only downside is the bulky construction of the unit, which means it takes up a fair amount of space and a handful to move around!

Thanks for reading!

 

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