HP W1907

The w1907's 19-inch wide-screen silhouette bears a familiar resemblance to its bigger (22-plus-inch) w-series siblings, but it's less adjustable. Still, with above-average text quality and built-in speakers, it's a good all-purpose display.

The w1907's base is actually cantilevered, rather than double-hinged, so it offers only a tilt and swivel mechanism. Two small nubs on either side of the silver-and-black stand secure and hide cables from frontal view. They're rudimentary protrusions that HP calls "cable management."

The glossy-screened w1907 did do very well in PC World Test Center text tests, producing agreeably sharp text in office documents and Web pages alike. It garnered enough praise to raise its score to Very Good in that test segment. It did fine on our graphics test, getting a Good from the judges. They gave it high marks for natural colors on a photo of colorful fruits and Web pages. Skin-tone reproduction and screen brightness, although good, slightly paled in comparison with other monitors.

A glossy bezel, slightly thicker than most in this class of monitors, surrounds the screen, while a touch of silver wraps around the edge of the monitor, providing thin design accents.

This 19-inch wide-screen has built-in speakers, located in the back of the monitor. They are adequate for operating system warnings and other beeps and pops from software applications. But for multimedia sounds, results are mixed. Audio in movies is sufficiently audible, but whispered dialogue is barely discernible to the ear. MP3 playback, on the other hand, is loud enough to hear. You can adjust the speaker volume using the two middle buttons out of the four silver on-screen display (OSD) buttons on the lower right of the display.

The OSD menu was easy to access and navigate. Controls include color temperature, inside which you can find individual adjustments for each RGB channel. Our test unit came with no software, but HP says My Display, its OSD replacement software, would work on this model. I downloaded and installed it, and found that it credibly replaced the monitor OSD and even added basic screen calibration features.

Scenes from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King revealed richly colored costumes and excellent background detail. Images were sharp and video was smooth, even in fast action clips. An autumn scene produced satisfying coppers, oranges, and yellows. Skin tone on actors was uniformly realistic.

Better-looking than many monitors, the HP w1907 would fare decently at a business, a home office, or at home for personal use, while adding some style to the desktop.

--Roy Santos