Asus PW191 Widescreen LCD Monitor

In our opinion, you can't assess the quality of any monitor without having a known point of reference to judge the product against.  In this case, we used the Asus PW191 alongside a Dell 2405FPW for a number of days to get a feel for how the two displays compared in a number of different usage scenarios.

Asus PW191 up front, Dell 2405FPW in Back

The first and most obvious difference between the two screens was real estate.  The 24" Dell monitor, with its native 1920x1200 resolution, versus the PW191's 1440x900 resolution, simply offered more area to work with.  Now, we can't very well penalize Asus because the PW191 is smaller since the PW191 is also much less expensive, but we wanted to emphasize the point that a larger panel typically means more pixels can fit on the screen, which in turn means more open windows without any overlap.  With that said, we found the PW191's native resolution of 1440x900 to be a perfect match for a panel of this size. Text was clear and easy to read from a good distance, and we never found ourselves straining to read small text (8 points or less).

Dell 2405FPW left, Asus PW191 right

One area where the Asus PW191 seemed to perform a bit better than the Dell monitor in our side by side comparison was in regard to contrast. This is surprising, considering the Dell 2405FPW is technically superior in a number of key categories.

It was very difficult to take a picture that demonstrated the difference, but if you look at the blues and greys in the margins in the shot above, you'll see that on the PW191 the colors clearly have more contrast, and even look more saturated.  As you can see in the chart above though, the 2405FPW's specifications are superior in terms of brightness and contrast.  What's happening is that the PW191's glare coating somewhat offsets the 2450's technical advantages.  But also notice the white on the Dell panel is more "white," whereas the white on the PW191 has a grey-ish hue. This too is a side effect of the Asus panel's glare-type coating.  Please bear in mind, however, that images can be tweaked and altered on any monitor to brighten or darken the screen and change the color temperature.  If any of you are in the market for a new LCD, do yourself a favor and check out the screen in-person if possible.  The specifications can sometimes be misleading, and a panel with technically inferior specs may in fact look better to your eyes.