Eizo FlexScan L795

Unlike PC and consumer electronics giants HP, Philips, Samsung, and Sony, Eizo doesn't have a massive amount of brand recognition in North America. However, Eizo has been selling monitors since the '80s, and they were dabbling with LCDs as early as 1992, so Eizo should be well-equipped to take on more established brands.

For this comparison, Eizo fielded its new FlexScan L795. At $927 street, the 19" L795 is quite pricey, but you get what you pay for. The L795 is loaded with a unique array of powerful features that put it a cut above its competition.

The L795's 19" panel has a native resolution of 1280x1024, which is pretty standard for 17, 18, and 19" screens. The display's 250 cd/m² brightness rating and 500:1 contrast ratio are average for screens in this display class, as is the L795's 25 millisecond pixel response time.

Multimonitor enthusiasts will want to note that the L795 has one of the narrowest screen borders of any monitor in this comparison. With horizontal and vertical border widths of only 19 millimeters, multiple L795s should be equally comfortable regardless of their arrangement.

The L795's LCD panel is anchored to a sturdy base using a standard four-bolt mounting pattern that also makes the screen compatible with all sorts of monitor arms and wall-mounting hardware. Users who elect to keep the L795 on its base will enjoy plenty of control over not only the monitor's height, but also its tilt. The screen can also be turned from to the left or right to give the user an ideal viewing angle.

When it comes to video inputs, the L795 supports both VGA and DVI, but that's it. Given the screen's hefty price tag, it would be nice if Eizo added a composite or S-Video input option to the mix as well. Eizo does, however, integrate a two-port USB hub directly into the screen.

For those who prefer portrait orientations, the L795 rotates 90 degrees. Since more than half of the screens we're looking at today support portrait orientations, the L795's ability to rotate isn't terribly unique. However, all the rotating screens in this comparison rely on third-party software to switch between landscape and portrait orientations, but the L795 can handle display rotation in hardware, as well. With graphics chip manufacturers like NVIDIA and S3 supporting display rotation in their latest drivers, the L795's software-independent rotation support isn't exactly a killer feature. Still, it's a nice touch.

Users can control the L795's rotation capabilities and a host of other features using the panel's on-screen display and a series of nine buttons located across the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, the black-on-black button text is virtually impossible to read from most angles. That's really a shame, since the buttons let users easily switch input sources, activate picture-in-picture, and control the screen's brightness and contrast without even entering the on-screen display (OSD).

The OSD greets users with full array of brightness, contrast, color temperature, saturation, hue, and RGB color controls. The OSD also controls the screen's clock, phase, and position when using an analog video source.

Eizo must share my pain when it comes to LCDs and resolution scaling, because the L795's OSD lets users run in full-screen or "normal" mode. Instead of clumsily stretching smaller resolutions across the entire screen, normal mode displays lower resolutions in the center of the screen and only uses as many pixels as the lower resolution requires. Since lower resolutions are displayed on progressively smaller areas of the screen, the L795's normal mode isn't really suitable for extremely low resolutions. However, I still prefer normal mode to full-screen interpolation for display resolutions as low as 1024x768. Normal mode is particularly handy for games that support 1280x960 rather than 1280x1024, too.

Of all the L795's features, the screen's robust picture-in-picture support is perhaps the most impressive. Though the L795 lacks composite or S-Video inputs, the picture-in-picture feature works with the screen's DVI and VGA inputs. Eizo's ActiveShot system lets users control not only the size and position of the picture-in-picture overlay, but also whether that overlay is a scaled down or clipped version of the screen's secondary input. ActiveShot is really neat, and the L795 stands out as the only monitor in our group that can build a picture-in-picture overlay from a VGA or DVI input. Unfortunately, the L795 also stands out as the only monitor here that can do picture-in-picture but lacks composite or S-Video inputs.

On the warranty front, Eizo boasts an industry leading five-year/30,000 hour warranty for the L795. Unfortunately, the warranty comes with a few caveats. For starters, the monitor's LCD panel and backlight are only covered for three years—that doesn't leave much for Eizo to cover for the remaining two. Eizo's warranty covers screens with five or more dead pixels, though no bonus points are given for dead pixels in close proximity to each other. Since the screen's LCD panel is only covered for three years of the five-year warranty, I suspect pixel defect coverage is also limited to three years.