Omni is another new brand to the PC Authority Labs, and while the price for this model was good its performance wasn’t as good as we would have liked for a new contender.
While the overall brightness and contrast were good, there were problems with darker colours and images, where the LCD17003LS was at times blurred and almost failed the dark greyscale test. In fact the screen seemed darker and duller overall, regardless of how the brightness, contrast and colour settings were tweaked. Whether this was from the screen coating or the backlighting we weren’t sure.
The knock-on effect of this was that the screen was relatively poor at displaying DVD movies, with their usually high number of dark sceens, but it was marginally better with 3D and on par with the CMV for text and graphics.
However, it did have amazing viewing angles, with a legible image available at almost any angle, even though it’s only rated at 160° horizontal and 140° vertical.
A saving grace was that the Omni’s price was low, and it came with a good pixel policy which helped it attain a much higher value score than average.