Maximum PC westinghouse RSS Feed

15 - 37 = 42

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:00:00 -0500

I purchased a 37-inch Westinghouse LVM-37W3SE LCD 1080p HDTV monitor in June 2007. A few months later, I found out that this particular model has faulty firmware that prevents it from working properly with many devices. For example, the Nvidia driver recognizes it as a different model Westinghouse 1080i monitor and refuses to set it in 1080p mode. I contacted customer support and received permission to return it. The monitor was returned in November, and it was received by Westinghouse two days later. I hadn’t heard anything from them until about a month ago, when I finally made a call to find out about the RMA status. (I’ve been out of the country on a business trip.)

I was promised a follow-up by several people, but no one would commit to when the monitor would be sent. They basically asked me to wait until I received my product. It has now been more than seven months, and I believe I have waited long enough! Thank God my trusty 15-inch LCD is still working fine.

—Jeong Lee

The Dog contacted a Westinghouse spokesperson who said the delay is due to the limited availability of parts for the 37-inch panel. “Westinghouse Digital apologizes for the delay and is working to update any delays in its process,” the spokesman said. To compensate Jeong for the lengthy wait, Westinghouse Digital said it would provide him with a new 42-inch 1080p LVM-42W2.

EMAIL THE WATCHDOG If you feel you’ve gotten a raw deal and need assistance setting a vendor straight, email the Dog at watchdog@maximumpc.com. Please include a detailed explanation of your problem as well as any correspondence you have sent concerning the issue.

Westinghouse L2610NM

David Murphy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:00:00 -0500

Taking a cue from ViewSonic’s playbook, Westinghouse’s L2610NM produces a crappy image out of the box. We haven’t seen a display ship with such a whited-out picture in a long time.

And unlike ViewSonic’s VX2240w, adjusting the L2610NM’s brightness and contrast settings does little to help matters.

Word to the wise: A monitor’s brightness isn’t like whipped cream.
Overloading the display’s luminosity won’t make the picture any sweeter.

Switching through the display’s color temperatures requires a large contrast adjustment, as moving from one mode to another tends to wash out a huge section of the display’s lighter grayscales.

The color saturation on the 1920x1200 display suffers from its overly bright settings. It trades richness and vibrancy for a brightness that can overpower the natural look you’d expect images, and even your desktop, to have. Colors look white, blacks look gray—everything looks far more washed out than we’d ever want. Depending on which color temperature we picked, the monitor’s grayscales were imbued with various tints of color. We were unable to find a true black-to-white gradient even once.

We’d normally list the connections this display carries right here, but it’s irrelevant; we don’t want you connecting anything to this 26-inch spotlight.

Westinghouse L2410NM

Katherine Stevenson — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:31:14 -0600

It’s easy to be seduced by the sheer size of a 24-inch LCD screen—any display that big just looks like it means business. And there was a time when large LCD panels were almost exclusively high-performance parts. That’s no longer the case. As the 24-inch LCDs reviewed here demonstrate, large screens are just as varied and prone to flaws as their smaller counterparts.

At 24 inches, an LCD can easily serve as an entertainment display, and the L2410NM encourages that thinking: It has a showy but tasteful bezel made of shiny black and clear acrylic, and it sits upon a clear acrylic base. Inputs for HDMI, VGA, Component, S-Video, and Composite let you connect the L2410NM to devices other than a PC, such as a DVD player or game console. The inclusion of HDCP lets you play any of today’s copy-protected high-def content on the 1920x1200-resolution screen.

But the L2410NM isn’t accommodating in all ways. The screen can’t be raised or lowered and it doesn’t swivel or pivot. And while you can tilt it to and fro, the hinge is so stiff that you must firmly hold down the base to do so. You can adjust the screen’s image only by choosing from Text, Picture, or Economy modes for a slight change in backlight and contrast. Not even brightness can be altered independently.

The L2410NM fared well in DisplayMate, its only notable flaws being a less-than-rich black and some loss of detail at the far light and dark ends of grayscales. And in our estimation, it’s perfectly serviceable for gaming. But the screen lacks vividness, making the picture as mediocre as the rest of the product.