BIOS: Technology Means Business

The SDM-HS95P is a gorgeous 19in. flatpanel computer monitor - period! Perfect for enthusiasts and gamers who want high-speed performance and a cutting-edge style from a personal display, the SDM-HS95P produces images that are responsive and sharp whether you're using your PC for gaming, watching video or running everyday computing applications. You can get larger screens with a higher resolution and more connectivity options for less money, but the SDM-HS95P is still excellent and will bring your multimedia applications to life.

Pros: Attractive design; easel-like stand; beautiful image quality
Cons: No swivel, TV tuner or speakers; basic features & connectivity

In addition to its chic silver styling with a 'rising' design (also available in black), the most attractive feature of the SDM-HS95P is its use of Sony's X-Black LCD technology. A league above screens from other manufacturers, X-Black optimises brightness, colour and clarity. The downside, and this is quite a big issue for a lot of users, is that the glossy screen is very reflective and the viewing angles are terrible in a bright room.

The best thing about X-black LCDs is that they look immediately different to other screens: black areas appear truly black with no hint of greying and colours seem solid and lifelike. The picture looks brighter (thanks to a sequence of optical inserts between the high-powered backlight and the LCD screen itself) and more vibrant thanks to the increased contrast now that the interference from scattered light has been eliminated.

Built-in ErgoBright technology is another neat feature that enables easy, one-touch adjustments, providing pre-set picture settings for PC, gaming or movie viewing. For instance, pressing the dedicated button on the front of the screen lets you toggle different settings to alter brightness and contrast levels for certain types of computing applications. Having said that, we managed to get the best results from the screen by manually configuring the settings.

Built for fast-paced computing applications, the wall-mountable SDM-HS95P is suitable as both a regular computer display and a gaming platform. It features a native resolution of 1280x1024 pixels, relatively quick response time of 12ms (17in. SDM-HS75P offers 8ms), super-high brightness of 400cd/m2, and a contrast ratio of 550:1. Unlike the company's LCD TVs, there's no integrated stereo speakers, subwoofer or audio/video input ports (such as S-Video or composite video).

Indeed, the SDM-HS95P offers just an analogue video (HD-15) and digital video port (DVI-D). The lack of component input means the SDM-HS95P can't handle HD (High Definition) TV signals without external connectors, unlike Sony's MFM-HT75W (£399 ex. VAT), so video buffs may need to look elsewhere.

The fact that it's not an LCD TV means you can also forget about built-in Teletext and Picture-in-Picture (PiP) mode, as well as channel, volume, video source controls or a remote control. With PiP you can watch TV in a small box while carrying out another computing activities, such as Web browsing or checking e-mail.

The SDM-HS95P is designed for general computing and leisure applications, but it still offers a relatively wide range of user controls. For instance, there's options to alter Contrast, Brightness, Eco Modes, Colour Temperature, Backlight, H/V Adjust, Phase, Pitch, Gamma, Sharpness, OSD Position, as well as the on-screen menu language (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japan, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, and Chinese).

There's also a Menu Lock to stop wandering hands from messing with your favoured settings. The menu system is reasonably intuitive, but it's not always clear which of the six front-mounted buttons you're supposed to press. [8.5]

About our tests:
To test imaging devices BIOS uses DisplayMate Technologies' DisplayMate, a software utility for adjusting, setting up, calibrating, tuning, testing, evaluating and improving image and picture quality on displays. It's designed to help us achieve the highest possible image and picture quality on any type of computer monitor, projector, TV or HDTV, with support for analogue and digital CRT, LCD, DLP, LCoS and plasma technologies. BIOS uses the software to check every aspect of a display's performance, including sharpness and contrast, colour and greyscale accuracy, as well as screen geometry. Where possible, we always use a digital connection for image quality purposes.