Design
If there's a design philosophy behind Legend's 30" LCD Screen, it's got to be simplicity. It's an LCD panel with a black bevel -- not that there are too many LCD panels out there that don't use black -- and a minimum of decoration of any type on the rather plain front facing. That's not a bad thing per se, though -- we've seen plenty of panels that look great except for the obtrusive vendor badge and flashy lights that the designers for some reason choose to stick in.
The 30" LCD Screen's controls sit on the top of the self-standing screen, while inputs are plugged in at the base of the display. One nice touch with the inputs is the printed diagram on the back of the unit that shows which audio outputs are compatible with which inputs, making it easier to quickly add or change inputs. As with most TV units that use upwards facing plugs, this isn't always an easy task, so the diagram is a welcome addition.
Like the panel, the 30" LCD's remote is also very plain, although the minimalist style works rather less well in this case. It's perfectly functional as a remote, but in our rather busy test environment, it stood out as being rather ugly, if we're being honest.
Once nice inclusion with the display is the inclusion of cables to cover all the 30" LCD Screen's supported display types, making it a snip to connect up everything from digital set top boxes to video game consoles and even PCs. Sure, it's a bit excessive to have a 30" widescreen monitor -- but it's also a lot of fun.
Features
The 30" LCD Screen is a 16:9 panel with a top resolution of 1280x 768. It's HD capable for 1080i, 720p, 480p and 576p digital sources, although it lacks any kind of digital video input such as HDMI. Instead, it offers the full gamut of analogue sources, including straight RF, composite, component, S-Video and RGB video for connecting up laptops and desktop PCs. The contrast ratio of the panel is fairly low at 350:1, and Legend rates the viewing angles at up to 85 degrees.
Performance
One thing that impressed us with the display right out of the box was that it was remarkably easy to set up, with a simple onscreen display that searches out all the connected signals it can find. Unlike some other inexpensive panels we've tested in the past, there's no sharing of video inputs between S-Video and Composite connections, so you can have a large number of devices connected up to the panel, all only a tap of the source button away.
The other thing we quickly noticed about the display was how noisy the external power supply was. It's fairly large external unit, and anyone pondering this particular panel should consider carefully placing it to minimise the noise if our display sample is anything to go by. If you're constantly running noisy material, such as action flicks or video games it's less of a concern, but fans of slow and ponderous drama or silent movies will notice it much more.
We tested the 30" LCD Screen using Displaymate Multimedia Edition, first to properly calibrate the panel and then to test its overall picture fidelity. While it performed well on colour clarity and display, it predictably fell a little short on displaying really clear blacks, which is what you'd expect from a panel with such a relatively low contrast ratio. Given the results we got, and the relatively low asking price of the display, however, we were pleasantly suprised with the overall quality of displayed images. You can undoubtedly get better LCD panels with better visual displays, but very few at this kind of asking price.
We also did some ad-hoc testing with various video signals to test the unit in actual operation, and found it to be a generally simple and pleasant unit to use. Like many flat screen TVs, the inbuilt speakers are absolutely nothing to get excited about whatsoever, but they'll do the job for simple TV watching and gameplay. One interesting quirk we found when testing the unit with games consoles was that the screen often had trouble keeping up with changes in resolution or refresh rates, leading to minor garbled screens, especially when booting up games titles.
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