In Practice
With office applications, we didn't notice any major problems. Text was clear, both with VGA and DVI inputs. The color rendering was surprisingly lively. Colors were saturated and pleasing to the eye. That's one of the main advantages of the X-Black technology used by this monitor. On the other hand, the negative effects of the anti-glare filter were still present. When the surrounding lighting is a little strong and the scene being displayed is fairly dark, the monitor looked more like a mirror.
With video games, as we mentioned, the panel's performance leaves something to be desired, though it certainly wasn't unusable. Looking closely we could see a little ghosting, but it was quite playable.
I have to say, though, that the latest 8 ms Samsung panels have an advantage from this point of view. Once you've tested the L90D+, for example, it's hard to work up any enthusiasm for a 12 ms panel that plods along by comparison.
On the other hand, the colors in FarCry and Half Life 2 were a real treat. The color saturation was impressive - probably exaggerated by the X-black filter, but for games that's not really a problem.
Watching movies left us with mixed impressions. Video noise was minimal, but the viewing angles were a little narrow. And you'd be advised to screen movies in the dark if you want to avoid unpleasant reflections in films with a lot of dark scenes.
Conclusion
The SDM-HS94P is the best monitor we've seen from Sony so far. But is that reason enough to buy it? The build quality justifies the additional cost, but I would have preferred a little more performance for the price of this monitor.
It's true that we've been accused of being a little hard on Sony products sometimes. But Sony isn't frankly all that easy on its customers when it come to their prices, and we have come to expect nothing less than exceptional products from the Japanese vendor.
