ASUS PW191

The future is widescreen – that’s the mantra everyone is chanting, from the movies to the computer industry, and we agree.

1440x900 is the resolution of choice on this 19" screen, obeying a perfect 16:10 ratio. The build is solid, with a heavy metal base (as opposed to Rob Trujillo, who plays heavy metal bass) and features a glossy screen, which is becoming more and more prevalent among laptop screens.

The display features tilt, height and rotate functions, and has a speaker on either side – although these aren’t much more than window dressing, as the speakers on a nearby laptop easily provided superior audio.

Inputs include DVI, VGA, speaker and a passthrough for headphones, and the screen is powered through a powerbrick rather than a straight cord. The OSD is controlled through touch style buttons ala Star Trek; however the coolness factor quickly rubs off when you discover how much of a pain they are to even get to respond. Treating each button as if trying to imprint your thumbprint on the panel yielded the most success, although still didn’t function all of the time.

Of course it’s all about the display quality, and here the PW191 does reasonably well. Tonal range was decent, being able to discern from a 1 black to 253 white in DisplayMate, however this is offset by obvious large bands across blue colour ramp, and standard banding across green and red. It passed the colour spectrum test with little difficulty.

Response time was average, with minimal but noticeable blurring in both gaming and video tests. Colours were decent once properly calibrated and the screen happily supports sRGB. ASUS’ hyped ‘SPLENDID’ technology is also along for the ride, providing a number of visual presets for different uses – however in reality this is as useless as the preset EQs on stereo systems, better results being obtained by calibrating yourself.

Sadly one glaring problem spoils the party for ASUS, and that’s the fact that there’s a large amount of light bleeding from the bottom of the screen into the image, particularly noticeable during dark scenes.

ASUS is to be commended for bringing widescreen into the sub 20” range and for offering a good warranty, however the PW191 is not the killer product it hoped it to be.