LG Flatron IPS225

LG has recently strengthened its efforts to come out on top in the race to make the best monitor by introducing more IPS-based desktop displays.  The Korean manufacturer promises that its latest offering, the IPS225, is calibrated before leaving the factory so you can be sure of accurate colour reproduction.  That was more than enough to have us reaching for testing equipment to find out if it's really true ...

Tech Specs & Design: an ordinary monitor ... with an IPS display

That IPS panel means that the IPS225 has wider vertical viewing angles than a monitor with traditional TN technology, which improves the ergonomic situation because the monitor looks the same whichever angle you look at it from.  That means it earns a few extra points in this section, which it badly needed.  Otherwise, the only other noteworthy features are VGA, DVI and HDMI inputs.

Responsiveness: LG is playing tricks on us

An IPS display isn't especially responsive, but LG has nevertheless managed to improve the way it handles fast-moving objects by interlacing every frame sent by the graphics card with a single black frame.  These empty frames are invisible to the naked eye, but help to cut back on ghosting and phantom trails behind objects.

Responsiveness
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Unfortunately, however, ghosting is still visible, but movements are a lot less blurry and moving objects are a lot sharper.  LG's technique is a good attempt at making its IPS monitor a more attractive prospect for gamers than a TN display with a 5 ms response time, but a much faster TN display with a response time of 2 ms is still a better bet.

The input lag is pretty normal: at 16 ms, it's definitely there, but not significant enough to be visible to the naked eye.  It won't hold you back when you're playing multiplayer games.

Colours already calibrated

As we mentioned in the introduction, every IPS225 is supposed to be calibrated before leaving the factory, and the one we received came with a booklet giving the test results for its gamma curve, colour temperature and deltaE score.  These are three figures that we calculate for all the monitors we test ourselves, but if we went by the values suggested by LG, then the IPS225 looked set to be an excellent monitor.

In reality, it lived up to our expectations.  The deltaE score, or the difference between the ideal colours and those actually displayed on screen, is slightly higher than the value found by LG according to our own equipment, but is still below 2.0.  That means that this monitor does indeed offer accurate colour reproduction.  Equally, we found the gamma to be identical to LG's results (2.2) and very similar results for the colour temperature (we found 6800 K; LG suggested 6500 K).  All three are excellent results!

Using the default settings, the monitor has a contrast ratio of 1200:1, which is well above our average figure of 850:1.  Nevertheless, we recommend you switch to sRGB mode, which allows you to lower the brightness, which is very high by default (around 250 cd/m²) to a less eye-watering 180 cd/m² without having a negative impact on either colour handling or contrast.