KDS has developed a mid-range monitor with the Radius-7c 17" LCD monitor. It does not excel in any particular area and has enough faults to not recommend it for those planning to use it for graphics work. The color saturation was very high like a TV, causing bright colors to appear white and darker colors tended to be black. The LCD tended to favor blue colors causing some tints of greens to be overshadowed by the blue as well as causing whites to have a faint blue tint. The monitor did do well as far as motion was concerned showing little to no ghosting during testing. It should work fine as a basic workhorse display for those using their computers for word processing, web surfing or even watching the occasional DVD.

Color, Contrast and Brightness

Overall the Radius 7c does a fair job of representing colors. When viewing a color chart on the screen the mid range intensity colors show good definition and contrast, but low intensity and high intensity colors were off balance. Low intensity colors tended to fade quickly to such dark colors as to be indistinguishable from black. High intensity colors tended to turn into bright white. This was very clear when viewing some digital photographs where the light blue sky ended up being a bright white sky. Also noticeable in digital photos was a tendency for the blue to overshadow greens. This led to some instances where a water pond with a slight green tint ended up looking blue on the screen. Black was also hard to represent on the screen as is with most LCD screens with a slight grayish tint being generated by the backlight.

Native Resolution and Interpolation

The Radius 7c offers a 1280x1024 native resolution at 60 to 75 Hz signal from the monitor. Text and graphics were sharp and crisp once the phase adjustment control was adjusted away from the auto adjustment. Its not as crisp as a CRT based screen would allow for, but it is acceptable for standard computer usage. When running the monitor outside of the native resolution the interpolation did a good job of interpolating colors for graphics, but text became more difficult to read. Low resolutions such as 640x480 were better represented than some of the higher resolutions such as 800x600 and 1024x768. Motion remained fluid on the LCD screen regardless of the resolution settings.

Gaming

This monitor presents a real mixed bag when it comes to games. While the interpolation does a fairly good job with color representations for the graphics it makes text very difficult to read in any gaming situation that is outside of the native resolution. This is a problem as many games on the market do not use a 1280x1024 resolution but a 1280x960 resolution instead. If the monitor were to not try to stretch the picture to fit this resolution, it would result in a better picture. Unfortunately, there was no way that I could find to turn off the interpolation. Motion was represented well will little or no ghosting of the images occurring. Games with dark colors will be problematic due to the low intensity color presentation mentioned above under the colors section.

Video Playback

Video playback was actually quite good on the screen. Much of this is probably due to the high color saturation that tends to be more inline with most modern television screens compared to computer monitors. It does still have the tendency to favor the blue portion of the spectrum which was distracting due sequences with blue-green tones that would get represented more as blue. Overall the motion of the screen was very smooth with no noticeable ghosting occurring during the playback.

Controls

The monitor has 4 buttons plus power which are located on the right side of the panel just behind the front bezel. Finding the controls while watching the monitor for the adjustments got confusing. This was further complicated by the placement of the menu items in a oval pattern similar to a clock. This coupled with the location of the buttons often caused the selection of the wrong item when trying to navigate the controls. The auto-adjustment feature worked fine for adjusting the screen to the resolution but the default phase setting left test that was blurry and difficult to read. Adjusting the phase properly aligned the pixels to be sharp and in focus.

Fit and Finish

Overall the monitor is well constructed and features a silver-gray metallic colored finish. Included is a desktop mount which allows the monitor to be adjusted for the vertical angle but not for the horizontal angel of the display. The mount also caused a very tight fit for the VGA cable to plug into the port on the panel. The supplied power cords require the use of an AC adapter box which is a bit annoying since this function could have been included in the panel without causing much additional space. The included speakers are only rated at 2 watts of power and had a very limited audible range. It was particularly weak in the low bass ranges and lacked overall volume.