This is the W2486L. As with many LG products, the design is very sleek.

What I Like About the LG W2486L Monitor

Aside from its its looks, here are few things that make this monitor stand out from the usual monitors.

Slim and Lightweight

It’s very, very slim. I have a very narrow table and it doesn’t take up much space at all. Here’s a size comparison with my Macbook.

Ambient light sensor

It’s got a light sensor that changes the brightness of the screen according the brightness of your room. (Thanks Justin for pointing it out!) This is great for someone who frequently alternates between light sources like me. I switch between fluorescent and accent lights quite a bit.

Nifty software and menu

For me the selling point is its extensive menu and software, the forteManager. Aside from the usual brightness and color controls, the LG W2486L menu comes built-in with nifty features like photo effects and cinema mode.

With photo effects, you could set the monitor display in Gaussian Blur, Sepia, and Black & White. Here’s a photo of the W2486L in Black & White Mode next to a book that I’ve currently reading, just so you know I didn’t Photoshop it.

I think photo effects is a great feature for content creators like designers, photographers and video producers. Imagine viewing your movie, photos or your logo designs in black and white with just a touch of a button on your monitor. No more need for messy adjustments on Photoshop or Final Cut Pro!

For the movie buffs and YouTube addicts, the menu also comes with a special cinema mode, which blacks out the rest of the window so you could focus on the movie.

As for the forteManager, it comes with a slew of calibration tools to make sure the monitor display colors as correctly as possible. I’m very particular about good color reproduction, so this is a great software to have.

What I Didn’t Like About the LG W2486L Monitor

As always, there were a few things that I wished could have been done better.

Touch menu buttons

I think this could be my personal bias, but I don’t really like touch buttons because I need to have some sort of feedback when I press something. I also have very a bad habit of surfing in dim light, so I had to struggle to find the right menu buttons.

Fixed viewing angle

I don’t really know the right phrase for this but I couldn’t change the vertical angle of the monitor. I have a habit of slouching after surfing the web for too long and this monitor just wouldn’t let me slouch! I had to perpetually sit straight because I couldn’t move the monitor vertically. Perhaps this is not such a bad thing after all, since I probably have very good posture now. Hahaha!

Manual resolution and color adjustments needed

I think this could be just my machines or my tech noobness, but I had to make manual resolution and color adjustments when I hooked up the W2486L with my netbook and Macbook. My machines somehow couldn’t automatically detect the right resolution to display on the monitor. And when it was hooked to my netbook, the color reproduction just wasn’t quite… there. With that said, installing forteManager did fix that.

No forteManager for the Mac

Unfortunately, the packaged software is not compatible with the Mac. I would’ve liked to see how the color calibration would work with my Macbook. Perhaps I could’ve produced some of the best colors ever! Nevertheless, the built-in menu can do a majority of what the software does. So the nifty features like cinema mode and photo effects can be still be applied to the Mac.

Anime on the LG W2486L Monitor

This is totally random but I couldn’t resist taking this shot. It’s my favorite anime of 2009, Kemono no Souja Erin on the LG W2486L. It’s like a mini TV!

So anyway, I hope you find this review useful. If you have any questions, do drop me a comment and I will try to answer as best as I can.

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