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The screen surround is 48x39cm and under the screen itself is a 6cm band that contains some really quite acceptable speakers. The screen is 38x30.5cm giving the diagonal measurement of 19inches. There is a horseshoe foot with a maximum depth of 15cm and the screen easily works within that base, unless you go for an extreme back tilt when it overlaps slightly at the top.

Just below the screen in the centre of the speaker portion is what looks like a Philips logo but there are two touch buttons the right one on/off glows green when on and the left one that activates the settings for Philips Light Frame technology that allows you to have different contrast/brightness settings for Internet, TV/Video and Photos shines blue. The adjustment is made by a very light touch in this area. More conventional adjustment can be made on a small window that by default will be – annoyingly – always on top but this adjustable.

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I have been using this for a couple of weeks. It works at up to 1280x1024 with a refresh rate of 72Hz. However it will work as lesser resolutions and indeed I used it at 1024x768 with my second PC that I use less, attached via a KVM switch.

As far as text work with say Word and Excel it was fine. For scrolling long pages on the Web perfectly acceptable as was reading and composing emails. You are waiting for the but – well there is one – I initially found it almost by accident. I rarely play games but found myself waiting for an email after a long day and too knackered to do anything constructive played a game called SphereJongg which you might guess from the name is a game of pairs but they are balls of various shades and colours. This in the past has shown non round balls with some panels, not so here as they are perfectly round but the shading varied quite considerably from top to bottom of the screen. This of course made me test certain graphical packages and these also showed that colours varied from top to bottom of the screen with the bottom being somewhat lighter. This is only noticeable when you are looking at blocks – or spheres – of the same colour that occur in both parts of the screen.

As for the speakers as I have already mentioned they are rather good for those found in a panel. I will investigate other Philips speakers after this experience. All I normally do is disconnect my own speakers and plug the supplied lead into my sound card, this initially I could not do as it had to be sent separately from the panel. However when it did arrive I needed to turn down the sound as it was too loud, okay you may say the panel is nearer than the speakers – and it is – but even after I turned the sound down I still hear things like beeps from events that I never even hear with my normal speakers and settings.

This is a ‘curates egg’ of a unit the shape is outdated but apart from the colour variation display is good. The ‘Light Frame’ adjustment under the screen is innovative and the speakers are excellent. The other problem is the price with so many ‘cheap’ panels around quality units always seem expensive. The only price I can find is £324.98 at Comet with free standard delivery, this price is stated to be £50 less than their store price.

http://www.comet.co.uk/comet/html/cache/374_241687.html