Sony GXD-L52H1 review: Professional display

The L52H1’s knack with sharpness and detail also serves it well with still images, be they scanned artworks or digital photographs - provided, at least, that the content of these still images is predominantly bright and colourful.

For predictably, the L52H1’s extreme brightness comes at the cost of a pretty uninspiring black level response. Dark parts of pictures or video footage look rather washed out and grey, as well as exhibiting a real lack of shadow detail.

To be fair, you can improve matters considerably if you use the set’s Standard preset, nudge the brightness and backlight settings down, and run the screen in one of its Eco modes. Plus, of course, the brighter the environment the screen is going to appear in, the less obvious its black level shortcomings will appear.

But there’s another problem to report in this area too, since the L52H1‘s contrast, together with its brightness and colour saturation, also drops off severely if the screen is watched from any sort of angle at all.

The L52H1 does manage to handle video colour tones rather better than we’d expected, though, given its lack of black level quality and aforementioned penchant for PC colourscapes. We liked the video conferencing setting tucked away in the onscreen menus too, for the way it cleverly spots and brightens faces, so that you don’t miss any subtle, potentially deal-making/breaking facial expression changes.

Video pictures additionally prove strikingly free of LCD technology’s tendency to blur video motion, thanks in no small part to a little CineMotion application tucked away within the screen’s onscreen menus. It’s a pity though that the motion clarity processing does cause some sporadic stutter and twitching, particularly during camera pans.

In the end, there’s no doubt that when the L52H1 is good, it’s very good indeed. It’s just a shame that the screen is only really at its best with very specific bright, largely static display material, and struggles at times with the sort of video content that more sophisticated customers might be looking for it to run.