The rather excellent Prad.de has written an LG IPS236V review (in their native German) which has now been published published. If you’re contemplating purchasing the IPS236V or other monitors in the series then the full review is well worth a read. The key points are summarised below.
A major limitation of the IPS236V, which was pointed out early on in the review, is the very limited ergonomic adjustment. The only adjustment option given to the user is 5 degrees of forwards and 15 degrees of backwards tilt. They also weren’t pleased with the touch-sensitive OSD where the touch sensitive areas proved to be too small and tightly packed together. Praise was given, however, for its silent (or at least inaudible) operation and low power consumption – 32.6W was recorded at the maximum luminance of 225 cd/m2 and 22.6W when calibrated to 120 cd/m2. Under default settings the monitor image was described as ‘colourful’ but overly bright with a noticeable blue tint (as is common with WLED-backlit monitors) and 91% recorded sRGB coverage (which is slightly limited). On the plus side the IPS236V produced smooth greyscale gradients without any tweaking. It was also observed that the visible blue tint could be largely alleviated by changing gamma from the default mode of ’2.2′ to ’2.0′ to produce a more natural-looking image.
Using factory defaults contrast was recorded in the review as a fairly lowly 660:1. Despite this, no significant excess backlight bleed-through was noted even though the silver sheen of ‘IPS glow’ could be readily observed. A contrast ratio of 717:1 was recorded using the sRGB mode preset but there was certainly room for improvement as far as colour accuracy was concerned – this improvement was achieved by tweaking the colour balance, contrast, brightness and gamma mode (from ‘2.2’ to ‘2.0) via the OSD and also the creation of a colorimeter-based calibration (ICC) profile. Other positives Prad.de reported in their review included that the LG IPS236 showed good luminance uniformity across most of the screen, with the exception of a 13.4% deviation recorded at the right edge of the central region.
Input lag was very short indeed, measured at just 1ms and was therefore virtually non-existant. For the total latency experienced by the user you must also consider several other factors including the pixel transition itself and the delay between frames (see this article). On this note; the overall responsiveness of the LG IPS236V left a lot to be desired according to the review. The stated ISO response time of 8ms and grey to grey response time of 5ms (see the monitor technology article) were far from achievable using an accurate oscilloscope-based measurement. Prad.de recorded an average response time of 30.8ms, which just goes to show how ludicrous and misleading the specified values of such things can be. They noted that a stronger overdrive algorithm would have been preferred and that they found the trailing bothersome.
We were hoping to have reviewed the IPS236V (and/or other members of the new LG IPS series, such as the E2370V) ourselves and added our own impressions by now but availability within the UK is sketchy and LG have been unable to provide us with any review samples thus far.