NEC's big screen is ready for its close-up
Connecting state and local government leaders
The 65-inch V651-TM is notable for its touch-screen interface, but it also stands out strictly as a monitor.
Elsewhere, we review NEC Display Solutions of America’s 65-inch V651-TM touch-screen monitor for its smart phone-like touch-screen usability. But while we had it in the office, we thought we’d also take a look at how it performs as a monitor.
Given its size, one would expect it to have problems near the edge, as do most big LCDs. That’s not to say that smaller monitors are perfect, but minor problems are magnified on the bigger panels. However, the images the V651-TM produced were surprisingly homogeneous. At an average brightness and contrast setting, we recorded 360 lumens at the very center of the screen.
Moving to the edges and corners revealed the expected drop in raw light power, but it was less than expected. At the very corners, the lowest number of sustained lumens recorded was 295. Because that difference is less than 100 lumens, it means the naked eye can’t tell any difference.
We also didn’t see any light bleeding in along the edges of the backlight. The bezel is pretty thick, which is necessary to hold in the upgraded glass panel and the heavy monitor, but that means that all the seals are tight and no light spills out.
The native resolution of the V651-TM is 1920 by 1080, which makes for fine images without any blocky shapes. Given that the pixel pitch is .74mm, this isn’t too surprising.
In terms of colors, reds and greens are very close to true. Blues are a little enhanced, probably because that is a technique companies use to produce, along with a solid black, a better display for video. And with a 65-inch panel, video display would certainly be a valid option. The refresh rate is 60 hertz by default. We would have liked to see that be a little bit higher for video, but we could almost feel the huge panel breathing heavily at that rate. In any case, we didn’t notice any screen flicker even when trying to trigger it with gray-on-gray transitions. The response time is around 8 milliseconds.
The panel is configured in landscape mode with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Thankfully it looks good, because moving it once it’s in place is not recommended. The setup guide says moving the unit requires four people, which we found to be true.
Once in place, the 178 degree viewing angle means that just about anyone in the room should be able to see the screen without any distortion.
As we say in our review of its touch-screen features, the V651-TM is a great overall display and input device. For agencies that need a large screen and would benefit from a touch-screen interface, it’s worth the $7,999 price.