Conclusion
It's not often I get too excited about hardware, for better or worse. While it's always the aim to stay objective, after the 9th iteration of something like a GeForce 4 to look at, in as many weeks, sometimes you get bored. So taking a look at the 920 PRO, my first monitor review for HEXUS, was a distinct pleasure. Definitely something I entered into with enthusiasm that's usually only reserved for expensive CPU's nobody else has, and £5000 Opteron test rigs HEXUS has no real right reviewing.So take my following conclusion with a pinch of rose tinted salt.
The Hercules ProphetView 920 PRO is the best monitor I have ever seen in isolation. Bearing in mind that I regularly visited John Lewis earlier this year to drool on an LG 295LM, a store which now has Apple's 23" Cinema on display too (under a wipe down sheet when I go and look), that's a fairly hefty recommendation if you know what both those monitors are like.
The Hercules isn't a 22" inch wide, wallet busting behemoth, with questionable gaming attributes however. It slots right in to the sub £325 gamer oriented LCD market with notable aplomb. 17 inches, 1280x1024 pixel array and excellent fast motion performance, combined with a low price, make it hard for me to say much bad about it.
The out of the box performance wasn't great, I needed to spend quality time with it to make it look good, but I certainly don't feel the need to cry out for the DVI version now.
Having seen recent Hitachi 16ms panels in the flesh before writing this review, post Hercules going back, I'm still confident in the above conclusion. I'm not convinced that recent 16ms offerings are 16ms over the whole colour range (black to white and all colours in between). Their performance was just as good as the Hercules when playing games, but that niggling notion that it might not be true 16ms played on my mind, while I'm confident the Herc is true 20ms. A purely psychological conclusion, but valid nonetheless. When the accepted advice that you should always see a monitor in the flesh has never rung more true, it's things like that which will stop you buying a monitor.
I'd love the Herc LCD panel in a thin Hitachi style bezel, in black, with DVI (to sooth the mind). But as it stands, I can't really fault it.
The DVI version should also be shipping right about now, for the same money, with the analogue PRO having been available for a little while now. Pick either up and thank me later.
Highly recommended.
Pros
Quite excellent gaming performancePeerless 2D when tweaked
Cheap price (£311 inc VAT from a popular UK online store)
Stylish
Cons
Bezel could be thinnerI'd have liked a USB hub too
1600x1200 would be nice if I'm being picky, but it is a 17" desktop panel after all
Score
Thanks
Caroline at Guillemot for sending me one and putting up with me being slack in the production of this articleKomplett for the digital camera used to take the shots.
