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While I wasn't able to confirm if every customer that specifies the 19" flat screen CRT option with their UltraStation, will receive the LG Flatron F900P, it was definitely a pleasant surprise to see one. I'd only seen one F900P in the flesh before, and it didn't disappoint then.
The sample as shipped, had a little issue with corner focus in the top left, but that was about it. It was sharp, bright and had good focus everywhere else. It's not as good as my usual Sony CPD-G400, but it seems to have better geometry than the Sony, at the expense of a slightly duller picture overall, in terms of colour and image sharpness.
However, despite being a dual input monitor like my Sony, it has 2 cool features that my Sony certainly doesn't have, and they live round the back.
4 port downstream, 1 port upstream USB hub (seems to be USB2.0 compatible) and component signal input. Component input isn't something you usually see on consumer monitors these days, and it's slightly redundant in terms of the equipment available to use with it, since not many graphics cards that I know of can generate or even support a component output signal, but it's certainly worth a mention, and cool to see. The lone 15-pin DSUB input is what you'll usually use to drive the display. Finally, while discussing the back door monitor features, it would have been nice to see the USB ports round the front somewhere, for easy access.
The on screen display is simple to use, should you need to adjust the picture. It came from the factory with slightly low contrast and brightness levels for my liking, but a few stabs at the simple controls were all that were needed to remedy that. A fine monitor, one I'd be happy to have in place of my Sony. For the price, we could argue the case for a decent sized flat panel display, but a strong CRT is good enough for me. The LG F900P certainly is.
Speakers
Videologic get speaker duty with the UltraStation, and suitable speakers they are too. Made up of 5 identical sattelite speakers and a potent subwoofer, you get excellent music performance. But the speaker set finds its voice when playing games or movies. Hooking them up to the SoundStorm equipped motherboard was a cinche. The NVIDIA speaker setup wizard tells you exactly what cable output needs to go where, when hooking it up to the following ports.
Note coaxial digital and full Toslink digital optical outputs, as well as the required ports for a full 6 channel speaker system. Being an MCP-T equipped nForce2 motherboard, Dolby decoding is a given, and it's well supported. Using the installed copy of PowerDVD on the UltraStation and hooking up a borrowed decoder showed that Dolby AC-3 output was present and correct.
The satellite speakers themselves are fairly meaty, giving good bass response even without the help of the subwoofer.
5 of those in the original Videologic packaging, along with the following subwoofer.
The subwoofer gives you control over volume for all the supplied channels, front, rear and LFE/subwoofer and there's a power switch round the back, should you want to turn them off for some reason. If there's any part of the package that I don't wish was going back, it's the speaker set that I'll be most sad to see go. I haven't played this much Unreal Tournament 2003 in months, and enjoying the surround sound audio so much is the reason why. It's definitely a cool gamers feature, and the first time I've experienced proper 6 channel gaming output that didn't sound wrong for some reason. The speakers are great, a real highlight of the whole UltraStation package.
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