Hanns-G LCD Monitor: A must have or a fear of?

If I’m already in testing pc components, peripherals and laptops, I accepted to test a Hanns-G, HU196D 19″ LCD screen.

My own monitor is a Philips 22″ 220EW8FB/05, an extremely good and beautiful screen, so when I heard about Hanns-G, my first impression was “What the heck is that”. The guy from the magazine I tested the monitor for, brought a plain box with one single inscription: Hanns-G. I expected something more, but whatever, not a problem I though.

When i pulled the monitor out of its box, I was shocked: the design of the monitor was quite nice, the shapes rounded, the LCD matted, reflection-less and the finishing was high quality. Not bad for the first impression i guess.

Then I tried to attach the stand. I work with computers for a long time, but this fight was the hardest: I figured, mounting a stand on an LCD is a 2-3 second job; I was totally wrong as it took me about 20 minutes and the help of a sharp knife. The slots where the LCD should have pop in were not perforated very well and i had to effectively cut the excessive plastic off before I could mount the LCD on the stand.
Well, done, the monitor was standing on “its own feet”, I plugged the VGA cable in, then the audio jack lastly the power cord, linked to the PC both, then switched the monitor on.

The first OS i was testing on was XP. The quality of the image was… well. Wow! Amazingly sharp. And the best is: I didn’t have to install anything as I got no CD/DVD or any other media with the monitor. XP installed the screen as Plug&Play monitor, and that’s all. The Windows Update service neither returned any drivers. After a quick search on the allmighty Google returned absolutely no information regarding any usable driver, but I guess I shouldn’t even need any, as the screen works as it should.

The second OS was Vista. I guessed it will recognize as a Hanns-G monitor (it will read it from the monitor’s ICs), but it didn’t. It knew the screen is an LCD monitor, also that is plug&play but nothing else. I thought the Update Service will find something as it’s smarter than the one bundled in XP, but again I was wrong as it didn’t. So I just used it as a plug&play monitor.
The quality of the image under Vista, well, a good advice: switch font smoothing off. With smoothing on the image was unexpectedly ugly. I’m don’t have a designer’s eye, but I guess if a designer would have see the quality of the image, would have cry like a baby. If you turn the smoothing off, the quality is the same as in XP’s case: a wow.

The monitor has 5 buttons below the screen:

1. Auto-Adjust: it auto-adjusts what you see on the screen, to best fit the screen
2. Volume-down: as it has integrated speakers, this is a volume control to turn the volume down
3. Switch On/Off: well… … guess it
4. Volume-up
5. Menu: read below

Pressing the button labeled with an “M” in the button-bar will bring the the On-Screen-Display up. This is simple and straight forward: you have 8 menu-points.

1. Brightness
2. Contrast
3. Image settings: you can control the position the image, the clock, the phase
4. Color Settings: the color grade. It has 3 presets: 5500 K, 6500 K and 9300 K and you can define your own as well.
5. OSD: control how the OSD looks and acts like
6. ETC: some misc settings like volume, DOS mode (text or graphic), VGA settings and restore factory defaults
7. Input Setting: Analog or Digital
8. Exit

Generally, the LCD is awesome: it acted well in any situation, the heat emitting is very reduced and the screen doesn’t reflect a thing. Compared to it’s price, $~200 + 19% VAT where I live, si an excellent choice if you don’t want or can’t spend a fortune on an LCD screen. My score would be 9.5 of 10.