LG W2363D Monitor - Full HD 3D Gaming

3D Gaming on Your Monitor

With 3D capabilities becoming more mainstream in the recent year, 3D-capable monitors have been slowly but steadily introduced in the market. The LG W2363D might not be first one at the forefront of 3D-capable HD monitors, but it gives the 3D gaming hungry crowd another option to look at.  We take a look at this 23-inch monitor, testing it on both standard and 3d gaming usage to see how it would fare.

Design

The LG W2363D monitor isn't eye-catching, and neither is it very trendy, in terms of design. In fact, it's rather bulky for monitors of its class, and has a non-descript angular form. If you were to display it in a row with other monitors, there's little to differentiate it. Like most monitors, it comes with the typical glossy black sheen which is easily dirtied by fingerprints.

As in most cases, the assemblage process out of the box is as simple as A-B-C - simply slot the neck into the hole of the base, and twist the lock at the bottom. We encountered no difficulties while setting up the monitor, but admittedly, the base doesn't seem very stable. To rectify this, do exercise extra care to ensure that the lock is fastened tightly and securely.

As mentioned beforehand, the setup is still slightly wobbly, but it is definitely not a deal breaker. As with most monitors, the W2363D can be made to tilt back about 20 degrees, but it doesn't have additional features like swiveling or height adjustment. For a 3D-capable monitor, the presence of these design aspects are especially imperative as they can contribute to a more conducive 3D gaming experience.

Next, we observed that the placement of ports are pretty haphazard, with only the DVI-D and Audio (In/Out) ports placed right at back of the monitor. Unlike most monitors, LG has separated the ports instead of consolidating them in one spot. Take for example, its two HDMI ports are situated on the right side of the monitor while the headphone jack is at the end of the monitor's frame. While this arrangement of ports is catered for ease of use and practicality, cable management will be cumbersome. Not only that, the design makes the monitor look a tad bulky, with the circular ends of its frame sticking out rather prominently.

The Features

LG has done away with physical controls, and in their stead, introduced a series of capacitive-touch buttons. Admittedly, we are not big fans of touch buttons because they can either be too sensitive or unresponsive, and in the W2363D's case, it's the latter. In our time testing the monitor, we found the buttons were unresponsive at times, resulting in several moments of impatience and frustration. Another small but essential aspect that has been overlooked is that while they are are easy to discern in bright light, the buttons do not light up when in the dark, making changes extremely frustrating especially if you want to watch a movie in the coziness of a dark room.

The LG W2363D's onscreen GUI is extremely straightforward and simple, with clear categorizations. Controls are like those you will find on a regular monitor. On touching the Source button, you would be brought to a panel where you can manually choose which source you want the monitor to scan, and alternatively, allows you to assign a default source or auto-switch when a change is detected. The Up and Down arrows allow you to toggle the value of a selected setting (where possible) and otherwise, double up as navigation keys. The Set button allows you to, well, finalize your settings. On tapping on the Menu button, you will get a pop-up that looks like this:

As mentioned earlier, the GUI is simple and straightforward. There are basically four grouped settings, and you can find  the usual suspects like Brightness, RGB, Contrast and Gamma spread across Picture and Color tabs. Under Tracking, you can customize the position of your GUI if you wish to. Strangely enough, LG has decided to go without presets like Movies, Games, or Sports - so users have to rely largely on their own naked eye to decide what's best.

Performance
 

Calibration

Per our normal tests, we first calibrated the monitor with Datacolor's Spyder3Elite before conducting our visual tests and video benchmark. Do note that we kick-started the series of test with these settings: changing color settings to the sRGB preset, with a contrast setting of 90 and brightness at 60.

DisplayMate

DisplayMate is an application which generates a sequence of test patterns to determine the capabilities of imaging devices like color and gray-scale accuracies. Here's what we gathered:

Screen Uniformity test:- Screen Uniformity was tested across all primary and secondary colors with no irregularities in tint or hue observed. While backlight bleeds aren't overtly prominent on the monitor, they were lightly visible at all four corners when darker colors were shown.

Stuck Pixel test:- No dead pixels were visible on the screen across all the colors.

Dark Gray Scale test:-  Blacks were murky but decent, with little to no irregularities across the blocks. Grey blocks were noticeable from level 2 onwards.

Color Tracking test:- No abnormal variations apparent.

256 Intensity Color Ramp test:- Compression artifacts appeared almost throughout the color bands, starting from about one tenth from the right till the end on the left. They were more prominent towards the end. Colors appear accurate, with red and green looking especially striking.

Color Scales test:- Smooth gradation was spotted across the color scales, with all colors looking a tad saturated. Whites were accurate.

Scaled Font:- Fonts were very discernible even up to the smallest size on both black and white background. However, the text was more clearly viewed on a black background, while the ones on the white were just slightly blurrer.

Movie Viewing in the Dark

As part of our video playback tests, we played two 1080p trailers - namely, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Star Trek. As mentioned in most of our monitor reviews, both offer a mixture of dark brooding and fast-moving action scenes that are great for testing out a monitor's video playback performance. We mentioned earlier that the control buttons are not lit up, making it extremely hard to discern where and what to press in the dark. Given that the monitor comes with touch-sensitive capacitive buttons (instead of physical buttons where we can at least make out where they are by feeling for them), we would much prefer the controls light up upon touching some portion of it. We noticed that while the color production was good, we spotted more noise across the scenes than usual with details looking too sharp and harsh. Blacks were decent and if we weren't looking closely, they actually looked pretty identical with those in the letterbox. Backlight bleeding wasn't prominent, but can be visibly seen across the edges of the screen on a uniform black display.

As reiterated in previous monitor reviews, watching clips with Dynamic Contrast on is a tricky love-hate affair. If executed properly, users can enjoy a close-to-cinematic experience with well-timed fade ins and outs. However, usually that's not the case. From our trial, we advise users against using the Dynamic Contrast mode as the constant contrast transitions can get annoying and uncomfortable.

Conclusion

The LG W2363D admittedly has some glowing specifications, like its high resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (Full HD 3D monitors aren't common yet), a dynamic contrast ratio of 70,000:1, dual HDMI inputs, and 400 nits brightness rating. It is a shame that the HMDI ports are not compatible for displaying stereo 3D content, and for that you would have to rely on the Dual-Link DVI input on the monitor.

Speaking of 3D, the LG W2363D did fared well in this aspect. The 120Hz monitor is made for 3D gaming in mind, with a dedicated thru-mode designed to eliminate input lag. We would like to reiterate that there are three main aspects that gamers interested in this monitor would look at: primarily, set-up procedure, response time and input lag, of which the W2363D does with pretty good results that included very minimal trailing and blurring. With that said, there's not much more in its performance to warrant a purchase if you have already gotten one of the earlier 3D-ready monitors.

Its 2D performance where users spend most time on is pretty average with prominent backlight bleeding and color compression artifacts. However, it has good text readability and performs well in rendering blacks, with accurate color and skin tones. Overall, it's not a bad screen, nor is it a magnificent one. Its Tru-Light addition is however distracting and frankly its novelty wears out as soon as you've tried it out.

Superficially, the LG W2363D doesn't impress with its bulky build, typical all-black body and awkward port placements - but these aren't deal breakers. We were hoping that the monitor might come with swivel or height adjustment features, but sadly, it only featured tilt capabilities. The GUI might be simple and fairly easy to use, but lacks a couple of features that are pretty commonplace in most monitors (such as presets).

Summing it up, the clumsy build of the LG W2363D is a decent 3D capable monitor that has an average 2D performance. However, its high price of S$699 might be a strong point of contention given that you can get much better performing 2D-only monitors at less than half the price for its size. So if 3D gaming is high on your must-do list, the LG monitor is a decent option if you can stomach the extra cost. If you need a monitor that excels in 2D and delivers a decent 3D experience, we've unfortunately yet to find one in the market. As such, you'll have to settle for a good 2D-only screen or an average 2D-cum-3D monitor, of which the LG W2363D is one of the few Full HD 3D monitors around.

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