Albatron LWX-30-AMS: Albatron's Convergence LCD TV

Full Screen Application (continued)

Even though the LWX-30-AMS is physically handicapped for your PC portion of this review, we continued with our LCD benchmark as normal. Here are a few quick looks at some demanding full screen applications (except solitaire, which is windowed). All of these screenshots are taken with DVI inputs on the LCDs.

Magic the Gathering: Battlegrounds - With the Samsung 213T LCD review from last month, we added the MTG:B benchmark to test vibrant colors and extremely light values. The 16 CCFL backlights make the image on this game exciting; lens effects in the game were drastically more brilliant than any LCD that we have tested to date.

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Morrowind - Morrowind is a game that was penalized severely by the unfortunate aspect ratio. We enjoy using Morrowind as a benchmark in our other LCD reviews, since it has such high bandwidth and signal requirements. Since the maximum resolution that Morrow will force on the LCD is 1024x768, the game proves to be a poor benchmark for this monitor. We are unable to pool much usable data from the imagery.

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Max Payne 2 - Max Payne 2 is what brought our attention to the problems with phase adjustment. After adjusting the phase, our experience with gaming on the monitor was totally flawless (minus the aspect ratio). Max Payne is a particularly favorite benchmark of ours, as it taxes average response time and darker darks. We did not have any issues with motion blur even though the TrTf response time is in the 25ms range. However, it can be said that the image on the LCD is perhaps a little too bright, and on occasion, we feel that the picture becomes a little washed out in comparison to the Samsung 213T and Dell 2001FP.

Click to enlarge.

Halo - At first, we approached this benchmark from a PC only perspective. However, we thought it only just later to attach our Xbox and also give the LWX-30-AMS a try with Halo's 480p signal. Unfortunately, even though Halo was the flagship game for Xbox, Microsoft/Bungie never considered 16:9 or 720p support. Both versions look basically the same (although the 9800XT signal is visually more appealing than the Xbox signal). Regardless, response time was not much of an issue on this LCD; gray-to-gray as well as TrTf response times were good enough not to cause issues with our display.

Enter the Matrix (Xbox) - Even though there are a few games that support 720p and 1080i on Xbox, for whatever reason, about half of those games render in 4:3 rather than 16:9 formats. Enter the Matrix gave us the ultimate LCD HDTV experience. Darks were dark, lights were light, the signal wasn't cropped and everything in the game just looked purely awesome. Even though games on the PC may be unplayable due to the aspect ratio, console games are a different story.

Solitaire - Here we go again with the famous solitaire test. You can see how our mouse behaves below in comparison to other LCDs.

Albatron LWX-30AMS

Samsung 213T

Dell 2001FP

First, notice that the LCD interleave is much wider, the panel itself is just bigger and the pixels larger/farther apart. The mouse cursor itself is very sharp, although difficult to tell in this image.