ADI S500 Review

Overall Rating

Good value, excellent design, audio, light weight, 3 year warranty on panel & backlight by Wholesales in Perth.

30000 hours lamp life, single speaker

LCD/TFT screens are quick on the development. Current products on sale include products that were sold at $1000 plus last year, now dropping to $500 price line. This makes it more affordable for many people who wants to save some desktop space.

LCD was never meant to be suitable for games. Anyone converting from CRT to LCD and expect LCD to perform as well as CRT, is wrong. Display quality is comparable to CRT nowadays due to greater contrast and brigthness features but due to the nature of LCD, speed is not one of the mentionable feature.

The ADI S500 is like any other LCD on the market. It features common spec including 250cd/m and 350:1 contrast ratio. It has 30000hr lamp life according to Wholesalers in Perth. This is rather disappointing bacause some manufacturers have lamp life up to 50000 hours, 1.5 time more. Regardless, S500 is still a good LCD. From the packaging to the actual design. I find S500 is one of the most attractive LCD monitors around, better in design than Mitsubishi DV158 least to say. S500 has some resemblences to Sony or Samsung LCD which uses silver titanium colours.

With the fastest response time of 16ms, the supplier boasted this as a selling feature. What it really does is the screen will not leave too much trail (ghosting) for moving pictures or mouse actions.

Audio is built in, however only one speaker is included. Sound is standard, nothing fancy nor of a high quality. But at a price lower than Mitsubishi DV 158, I can use the difference to purchase an additional 2.1 Creative SB2400 speaker and get better sound out of it.

It's slim & light weight measuring only 3.3kg. Cables are included to connect the audio to your audio card output. Power supply is external. I think this is better because it is easier to find out whether the power supply has failed us or the actual panel has failed us. Obviously, with that comes external power box, which may messed up the area. VGA connector is built dead on the the panel, removing the possibility of replacing a failed VGA cable. (Not many people really have this problem, so no worries.)

Overall, it's an excellent LCD screen for first time user. Spend less for the equivalent specs, and with 3 years warranty on panel and backlight, what more can you ask from an LCD monitor manufacturer?