The cost of LCD panels continues to head south and, at £729 ex VAT, NEC-Mitsubishi's new LCD1830 TFT display sets a new price point for 18in panels.

What you get for your money is an attractive, rock solid 1,280 x 1,024 display with two analogue inputs, good colour management options and an easy-to-use onscreen display. At native resolution the image quality was excellent, both for text and pictures.

With another computer connected to the second input you can easily switch between the two using a dedicated front panel button. A menu option determines whether non-native resolutions are scaled up to full screen size or positioned in a central window.

The 1830 happily switched back and forth between a desktop PC, and both a Mac Powerbook and PC notebook can be set to a variety of resolutions from 640 x 480 up.

The provision of an ICC colour profile makes this panel a good choice for colour-critical work. For those who can't be bothered with the complexity of a colour-managed workflow using device-based profiles, you can set the panel to the sRGB colour space using one of the options on the colour submenu.

An increasing number of devices, from digital cameras and scanners to inkjet printers, are adopting sRGB and this is one of the simplest ways to ensure that your image colours remain true regardless of what you're using to view them.

If that's not important to you, the 1830 offers more options than most for colour adjustments. In addition to 'Native' and sRGB, there are four colour temperature pre-sets which can be tweaked either by raising and lowering the colour temperature, or by adjusting the individual red, green and blue channels.

NEC's Omnicolour system goes a step further by providing cyan, magenta, and yellow controls (you're still adjusting RGB - it's just a different way of presenting the information) for those who prefer to work with the subtractive colour model used in commercial printing.

Contact:

NEC-Mitsubishi 020 7202 6300 www.nec.co.uk