You may not have heard of AG Neovo before, but you're likely to remember its monitors. The company's LCD displays are far from your typical panels on beige pedestals. The 19-inch AG Neovo S-19 has an eye-catching design—but its $1,200 street price is also likely to catch your attention. Although some aspects of the monitor justify such a premium price, the display is limited in other important ways.

The S-19 has a dark glass plate that covers the bezel and the LCD panel, giving the monitor a subdued yet stylish presence. Because you touch the glass on the bezel when adjusting the monitor, though, fingerprints are more of a problem than with a matte plastic bezel. Also, glare from lights directly behind us was noticeable.

The base folds up against the back of the monitor and locks with a dial that seems more complex than it needs to be. When open, you must lock the base in position, but locking it closed seems pointless—the hinge is so stiff that the monitor can't fall open. The company touts this design, saying it lets you quickly and easily transform the S-19 from a desktop display to a wall-mounted display and back. But this transformation will probably occur just once in a monitor's life, so this feature's value may be limited. When using the S-19 as a desktop monitor, you can tilt it back with one hand, but you'll need two hands to pull it up again. The monitor cannot swivel and does not rotate between portrait and landscape modes.

In the lower right-hand corner, the front panel has six buttons with embossed legends that are difficult to read. Fortunately, you can identify the buttons' functions by their positions on the panel. One is the Power switch, and another is the Auto-Sync button, which also serves as the Enter button for the on-screen menu. The four remaining buttons let you open and navigate the on-screen menu system, which is not as intuitive as we would have expected but has plenty of options and settings. The monitor has inputs for analog and DVI computer signals as well as for S-Video. Neovo provides cables for all three, plus an adapter cable that accepts composite video. A separate power brick plugs into an electrical outlet and has a small cable cover on the back that is easier to work than most.

AG Neovo also uses the Neo-V Crystal Optic Filter, which the company claims improves color performance. Our DisplayMate test images looked good. Color tracking was also good, and color ramps were smooth. We found no signs of ghosting or streaking.

Viewing the monitor at extreme angles caused a significant loss of brightness, but viewing-angle effects in general were minimal compared with most other panels. Gray-shade shift and loss of contrast were minimal. Both were most noticeable when viewing the display at angles of 70 degrees or more, as opposed to straight vertical or horizontal viewing. But despite a few flaws, the image quality was still equal to that of the better monitors in the S-19's class.

As with almost all 19-inch LCD monitors, the S-19 has a 1,280-by-1,024 native resolution. The display scales lower resolution images up to fill the screen and can accept higher-resolution images from Microsoft Windows XP systems, but not from Windows 98 machines. Scaling was smooth with few artifacts. With an analog signal, the auto-sync feature adjusted the image size, position, and timing precisely, with no noticeable pixel jitter.

Gray-scale response was excellent at both ends of the spectrum for digital and analog signals. There were no noticeable pixel defects, but two tiny specks of foreign material on or behind the cover glass made slightly noticeable black spots. White-screen uniformity was excellent, and a glow at the sides and lower corners of the black screen appeared to be the result of viewing-angle differences.

The question is whether this combination of excellent picture quality and a few shortcomings is worth the premium price of the AG Neovo S-19. For those who hold screen quality paramount or who fall in love with the case design, the answer may be yes. Most people, however, will be just as happy with available monitors that can do as much and sometimes more, yet cost considerably less.