FORMAC Gallery 2010 20" LCD Monitor (Mac)

Rating:
Summary: When it worked, it was good quality picture
Review: 3 year warranty eh? When I received this monitor it flickered horribly. I returned it for repair or replacement and was told nothing was wrong with it. I then dealt with the shop I purchased from who were able to verify the problem, but Formac wouldn't issue a refund, they'd only accept it for more repairs. (what's the point if they can't seem to find the problem in the first place). After 3 months of this back and forth I decided Formac wasn't worth dealing any more and I bought an Apple monitor instead. Think twice before dealing with Formac.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Picture but nothing else
Review: Contents:
1. Review written after a couple of days of use
2. Addendum written after 9 month of use

+++ 1. Review written after a couple of days of use:

First the good thing: The gallery 2010's picture is excellent. Brightness can be adjusted in a wide range, thus pleasent to look at from night till noon. High contrast, wide viewing angles without color distortion. Acceptable motion blur due to relatively fast switching, video is ok.

No dead pixels on my one, just a small (ca. 1.5 mm) spot which is slightly darker than the rest, (barely) visible only at certain gray scales.

Now for the drawbacks: cable fix (no problem until it breaks), no OSD, only brightness can be adjusted. Brightness adjustment too sensitive, accurate adjustment hard. Although active surface has good anti-glare coating, the frame has not. Picture displayed may be mirrored on the inner edges of the frame.

I use the gallery 2010 with a Windows PC. The gallery has a fixed gamma of 1.8, but on Windows 2.2 is standard. Thus I correct the gamma using the graphics card causing some gray scale resolution loss. The gallery has a fixed white point of 6500K, that's ok for me. If it wasn't, graphics card based correction would cause more loss of gray scale resolution.

Dot pitch is 0.255 which is less than what I had before. It took some days to get used to this. Be careful, that small dot pitch might strain your eyes!

Information from Formac is quite poor. They don't specify gamma or whitepoint, I got the specs from the info reported via the DVI interface. Formac also does not offer an ICC/ICM profile.

I like the gallery though, because its the picture that counts when using a display. Also, the price is quite low in contrast to comparable displays from other manufacturers.

+++ 2. Addendum written after 9 month of use

No regret having bought this display. The picture is as good as it was on the first day, no dead pixels, cable didn't break.

The 1.5 mm dark "spot" is still there, but I notice it only when intentionally seraching for it, because it didn't get darker and is only visible with certain gray scales. I also got completely used to the relatively small dot pitch, but YMMV.

The gamma I'm using now is the native 1.8 rather than Windows' 2.2. This is also just a matter of getting used to and this way there is no loss in accuracy.

I've also tried the Gallery CAL color calibration device offerered by Formac. Better save your money, this was a complete failure since that device (and a replacement I got from Formac) is so inaccurate. It degrades the otherwise good default picture with completly unpredictable "corrections".

Some experiments indicate that the Gallery 2010 has mechanisms in its LCD panel driver to improve the switching times between different grayscales, although Formac doesn't mention this. The result is that the panel driver ensures the best achievable response from the panel, good for videos and games.

The simplistic approach with digital input and brightness control only is not a drawback. You wouldn't like to have a sub-optimal analogue input with such a display. And being in the digital domain, adjusting contrast (which is analogue gain) is not necessary.

The more important thing is that brightness control just affects the CFD brightness (the light source behind the screen) in a wide range and not some other fancy combination of parameters as seen with other displays.

Offloading gamma and color correction into the display (via OSD) is not supported by the 2010, but it can be done in the graphics card. A real benefit in using display-based correction other than being convenient would occur only when the display's internal resolution was higher than that of the graphics card (which it isn't).

For me the best results are achieved with no settings other than for the CFL brightness. Simple and effective.

The bottom line is that I'm very pleased with this display: Its a pleasure to look at and better than anything else I see every day. It is still a good deal and if it broke, I'd buy it again.

Rating:
Summary: Formac - BEWARE!
Review: What can I say, never in my life have I been so utterly dissapointed with a purcahse. These monitors aren't cheap by any standard, as such you'd expect a performance in line with the price, and maybe, just maybe that some of the claims that the manufacturers make are actually based in truth rather that out and out lies.

Response time 10-25ms? I've seen first generation TFT's of a cost of £100 outperform this kit. It's claims about zero ghosting are a complete lie, It suffers form some of the worst ghosting artefacts I've encountered on a TFT. Which considering it's claims to be ideally suite to video editing and the like make this TFT useless for the job.

After sales support from Formac? This just doesn't exist, full stop. They seemingly will only deal with the dealers direct. Not you, the little guy.

My advice is steer well clear of this product & the manufacturer as they both fail to deliver to the standards they claim.