Westinghouse L2610NW Mid-Size Monitor

Here’s a surprise—a reasonably-priced mid-size monitor that actually outperforms the top brands’ offerings in terms of critical video quality. The Westinghouse L2610NW isn’t a full-featured set, offering only VGA and HDMI inputs and no other niceties such as a remote control or DTV tuner, but the set’s technical pedigree is right up there with the very best.

The L2610NW is marketed as a 26-inch set, but the fine print reveals a 25.5-inch viewable measurement (which is allowed in the US but not elsewhere, a holdover from the CRT days), and although the screen size is a tad larger than other sets pixels in the price class, the pixel count is the same, at 1920x1200. You won’t be getting any more pixels for your dollar, just a smidgen more screen real estate.

Out of the box, the Westinghouse is factory-configured for the optimum 6500-degree neutral color temperature (white point), and the color analyzer returns a grade A+ report, with measurements over the entire gray scale (bright white to very dark gray) that vary only by the barest amount (under 2 percent at the extreme low end of the scale and only around 1 percent or less over the rest)—this is an exemplary result, on par with much more expensive displays that have themselves endured a full calibration. The colorimetry is similarly good, with both the primary and secondary colors fairly closely matching the target points that are defined in the DTV standard. This ensures that color tones are properly reproduced and without exaggeration as is often the case.

All is not well in the technical evaluation department, however, as the L2610NW mis-behaves with 1080p HD program material in terms of the picture aspect ratio. There is a setting that suggests 1:1 pixel-to-pixel formatting, but even when that selection is chosen, a 1920x1080 16:9 image still fills the entire screen. With 1920x1200 (or 16:10) monitors like this one, a 1080-line 16:9 image should fill out to the sides of the monitor’s screen, with small letterbox black bars at the top and the bottom. Here, the L2610NW presents the 16:9 image in full-screen 16:10 format, which puts everything in the image on a diet— with a subtle, but often noticeable thinning (or vertical stretching, if you will).

FEATURES

• HDMI input

• VGA input

USER INTERFACE

Bare-bones at best, the Westy has a tight cluster of six small buttons positioned at the lower right side screen edge, with no nomenclature and virtually invisible tiny molded icons on the button surfaces. Once you’ve figured out which button does which (and it isn’t intuitive by any means— you’ll want to keep the owner’s manual handy when making adjustments), the menu offerings are fairly extensive, and allow control over most screen adjustment functions (but not color or tint).

RECOMMENDED PICTURE SETTINGS

Note: The following recommended settings were obtained using a Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-ray player, set to 1080p output, and connected to the set via HDMI, using the recently released Digital Video Essentials HD Basics Bluray test and set-up disc. Having a test DVD and/or HD disc on hand is really the only way to ensure that your source components and the display are properly adjusted, especially with respect to the brightness and contrast controls.

Color Temperature 6500°

Sharpness 3

Backlight 50

Ambient Light Tolerance: At the mid-point backlighting setting, the Westy puts out a suitably bright 50 foot-Lamberts, enough to overcome bright ambient lighting, and the anti-glare screen coating prevents reflection-induced artifacts.