For the past couple of years, TFT monitor manufacturers have made plenty of noise about the response time of their latest LCD panel. This used to be very important, as panels with a slow 25ms or 35ms response would suffer from horrible smearing that made it impossible to play games, but for the last year or so every TFT display on the market has sported a response time that is more than fast enough for even the most avid gamer.

LG has responded to this new reality by boosting the contrast ratio of its latest TFT displays, including this 20.1-inch L203WT, in a bid to enhance the quality of the displayed image. This is a widescreen display with a resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 pixels and an aspect ratio of 16:10, which makes it ideal for watching movies, including High Definition 720p.

The 8ms response time and 300-nit brightness ratings are mainstream, however the 1400:1 contrast ratio is a major leap forward from the usual 500:1 and 700:1 figures that we are used to seeing.

LG has achieved this with a picture-enhancing chip called the F-Engine, which is used to adjust the image with a process called DFC (Digital Fine Contrast). The result is that you can toggle through three modes - Movie, Text and User Defined - using two dedicated F-Engine buttons on the bottom edge of the bezel, to get the picture that best suits your needs. You can also turn the F-Engine off, so a pedant might say that there are four modes.

Brightness and contrast are a matter of personal preference and generally speaking a display with big numbers glares horribly. We find that most displays are delivered with the settings at 100 percent so the first job is to turn them down to a useable level.

In the case of the L203WT we found that a brightness setting of 50 percent and a contrast setting of 70 percent resulted in an image that was both comfortable on the eye and also nice and clear. This was with the F-Engine disabled, so the background white on documents was off-white. In Text mode the white setting brightened up and in Movie mode white was brightest of all, but it doesn't become uncomfortable, and that's a first as far as we are concerned.

Most of the time we felt no need to use the F-Engine but it's handy to have it in reserve, just a button push away, when you want to jazz up a movie or a picture.

The rest of the display is fairly run-of-the-mill. You get one DVI connector and one VGA port, the mains power cord plugs directly into the display without an adapter and the only adjustment is tilt.

LG claims that the L203WT has a viewable angle of 170 degrees in both the horizontal and vertical planes, however we found that as you stand up from your desk the picture gets noticeably dimmer, so we're not convinced on this point.

The LG L203WT is an attractive, widescreen, 20.1-inch display that has the same physical screen area as a regular 19-inch CRT monitor, yet manages to cram in 35 percent more pixels and still presents a sharp, clear, bright and pleasant picture. It does all this for a great price and we admire it hugely.