If I walked up to you in the street and asked if you'd ever been in love, I'm sure many of you would assure me you have. Perhaps give me some advice on relationships, women, cars, all those objects of desire. Well I'm afraid I've got bad news for you - you've never loved and you've never really wanted anything. Why? Because you've never used the new Sony CPD-L181A 18.1" TFT Monitor. Fact. I'm not prepared to negotiate.

You know you've got something really special when you removed this object of desire from the box, place it on the side and can't even figure out how to plug it in. Now that's technology for you. I'm ashamed to say that we had to actually read the manual to figure out where the cables went. The problem is the back plate needs to be removed to gain access to the connectors; all very simple when you know how and it works surprisingly well, keeping all the cables neatly together and stopping people from fiddling with them. Obviously going back to the RTFM old school.....

Anyway, back to the new object of my desire; when Windows first boots up it detects the monitor and prompts you to put in the driver disk which Sony supply. This sets up the monitor's profile and away you go. It can have any resolution up to 1280x1024 at true colour and very nice it looks too. The image is so crisp and clear it just puts a standard monitor to shame.

The controls on the CPD-L181A are innovative and minimalist at the same time. Being a TFT monitor, the number of controls needed is reduced drastically although everything you'd expect is still present, such as brightness, contrast, pitch, phase etc. Best of all is the Auto Adjustment setting. One press of this button and the image shifts itself around the monitor until it is set up practically perfectly. You can still tweak the image after it's done, but the monitor does it wonderfully by itself.

We ran through our Displaymate tests, purely for something to do because none of us had any doubts that it was going to pass every single test. There really is nothing that you can fault the CPD-L181A on image wise and even runs through the latest games with an image quality you never thought could be possible. The picture is so sharp, objects that had always been invisible on our everyday monitors are there plain as day just because of the clarity and how well it displays the colours.

If you're just about to buy a new PC then forget that idea and buy a Sony CPD-L181A instead. No, that isn't an error it is an either/or choice. At just under £2100 for the CPD-L181A, it's going to be out of most people's budget but in the high-end workstation/corporate market it's ideal. Given the choice, if I had £2100 to spend on a system, I'd probably buy a CPD-L181A and then just stare at it for the two years it took me to save up for a base unit.......

Recommended Retail Price
£2095

Warranty
3 Years (Backlight 1Yr)

Height x width x depth (inc stand)
422x468x208

Weight (kg)
9

Screen Size (in)
18.1

Visable Screen Size (in)
18.1

Tube Type
TFT

Pitch size (mm)
0.281

Maximum Resolution @ Refresh Rate
1280 x 1024 @ 85Hz