Conclusion
The XL20 is the future of LCD monitors. We particularly appreciated its really wide gamut, the possibility to easily switch from one color profile to another and the new viewing angles (finally!!!). Whether it’s for movies or dual monitor configurations, it is really a great improvement.
The only thing is, we don’t know the price. In principle it should be moderate. We have heard somewhere around
1400 euros, but this hasn’t been officially confirmed. Of course, this would be much more expensive than current 20” monitors - priced around €350. This has also to be compared to the only other LED monitor on the market, the NEC with the same diagonal, same gamut, but priced at 5000€ (!). Also, this is the first LCD of this type to target the general public. We believe that little by little, this technology will be present in more affordable monitors.
Another detail to settle in the future is the design. LED backlights really increase thickness. In consequence, because of the unattractive design and lack of progress in reaction time, not everyone will go for this technology.
What improvements in 2007 ?
This year will be a good year for monitors. We first expect many HDMI monitors with HDCP compatibility to display protected digital content (consoles and movies).
We also expect the first 1ms monitors, but we are skeptical about the real improvements induced by this reduction in time. Our hopes are on the future 100 and 120 Hz monitors as we have seen in the TV world.
Canon persists on announcing the release of the first SED monitors by the end of the year in Japan and in the US. At first, this technology will be restricted to TVs. This is something that we won’t test at first except if we see a real convergence between the world of the office and living room (which is likely to happen). There are now some very good TVs that can be used very effectively as monitors!
OLED: does it really exist? We haven’t heard from this technology for a long time. Samsung pretends to have forgotten about it and Sony announced stopping its production of monitors (and all technologies are concerned). Will they ever succeed one day in releasing an OLED?
