With an ample 26-inch viewing diagonal sporting a true 16:9 aspect
ratio, Panasonic’s BT-LH2600W brings up the flagship position in the
company’s professional LCD monitor line-up. Although not especially
large by today’s flat-panel standards, the LH2600W is noticeably larger
than its 17-inch LCD cousin in Panasonic’s pro range and provides a
rectangle of nearly optimum size for viewing distances of two to three
feet.

The incredibly high contrast of the LH2600W, coupled with its
not-exactly-black shadow levels, amplify video defects in source
material to colossal proportions. Any Gibbs noise, gradient banding,
block aliasing or other artifacts in the signal will show up on this
display with blatant misdemeanor. Video aberrations that once appeared
subtle when displayed on the lower contrast of a CRT will be much
brasher on this imaging engine. Conversely, if content looks good on
the Panasonic panel you can rest assured it’ll look marvelous on a CRT-
provided the CRT is not sitting next to the LH2600W.

This display has inputs for Composite, Y/C, analog Component (both
color-difference and RGBS) and two SDI feeds. All inputs except Y/C are
terminated on BNC connectors. There’s even a separate vertical sync
input so you could use the panel with RGBHV computer signals, although
the lack of a DCC "plug-and-play" channel means you can’t
auto-configure the graphics card; the panel’s input sync range is also
rather narrow. Fortunately, it was easy to configure a GeForce card to
generate the acceptable 1368 x 768 resolution at 60 Hz- two pixels
wider than the native resolution of the panel itself, but necessary
because modes on GeForce cards must be an even multiple of 8-pixels.
Similar arrangements are possible on other common graphics cards.

You may notice, from the resolution quoted above, that 1080-line HD
content must be down-converted to fit the LH2600W’s LCD panel, as is
the case for most recent panels of this size and type. Panasonic has,
however, added a feature that will let you evaluate SDI sources by
switching to a windowed pixel-for-pixel view of the unscaled video; you
can pan to any of the nine quadrants in the resulting virtual frame.
You can select this function, along with many others, via an on-screen
menu and optionally bind it to any of the five user-programmable
buttons. Safe-area masks, gamma curves and even a built-in waveform
monitor can be assigned to the panel buttons, as well. A separate set
of dedicated buttons are for source selection.

The LH2600W may not be able to display 1080 HD without scaling, but at
least the scaling it performs is virtually flawless. LCD switching
speed also leaves absolutely nothing to be desired. Even on the most
torturous high-contrast scenes- suffering from both telecine 3:2
pull-down and quick pans- I couldn’t make this panel cough up visible
signs of lag. I didn’t notice any obvious deinterlacing or scaling
artifacts, either. This is not to say that telecined video was visibly
smooth- human flicker sensitivity increases with contrast, so the
LH2600W occasionally rendered cinematic content with nearly punctuated
kinematics.

Unsurprisingly, it was possible to tone down both spatial and temporal
deficiencies in video by reducing the backlight drive strength, but
this would be very difficult to advise. The image looked so much
better, and was so much more revealing, when the panel was left at its
default calibration that I really can’t imagine trying to subdue it
just to make 24fps content look smoother. At any rate, computer video
at 60 Hz rendered quite smoothly, as did 30fps broadcast-standard
video, so the panel itself clearly had no issues with temporal
artifacts.

There was only one notable flaw that I discovered during my evaluation:
a terrible whine made by the panel’s power supply. The noise was
surprisingly loud, with principle harmonics well under 1 KHz (where
they were especially irritating). The fact that the panel would
sometimes telegraph this annoying sound in a bizarre staccato pattern
led me to conclude, however, that the problem was not an intrinsic
design flaw. It was unique to the unit I received, which had been
shipped around the country to various places prior to my review.

At least the built-in fan was quiet. Not quite inaudible, but
definitely more polite than the one in the 17-inch panel I reviewed
last year and easy enough to live with. The fan is switchable, for
silent operation (at least on units with non-defective power supplies),
but the resulting drop in backlight intensity may require you to adjust
the image. The panel exhibited strong relationships between backlight
intensity and gamma, with one steep built-in transfer function
restoring vibrance compellingly in the fan-off mode, though that wasn’t
the intent. Naturally, typical users will want to leave the fan on and
calibrate the unit at maximum backlight drive. It will yield images
with the most linear contrast this way, given the fixed black-level of
the panel.

Overall, the BT-LH2600W performed admirably, as you might expect from
an LCD panel in its price range. Solidly fabricated, with gorgeous
reproduction characteristics, the 26-inch LCD is a display device that
can very nearly put the old CRT program monitor to bed forever.