If you’ve always wanted a big LCD screen, but have been put off by the astronomical prices of Apple’s high-end products, then the Gallery 2010 may be just what you’ve been looking for. As the only non-Apple display to support the Apple Display Connector (ADC) technology, Formac’s Gallery 1740 won plaudits. The company then extended its range of LCD displays with the Gallery 2010, which, as its name suggests, features a 20.1” screen.
The 2010 is in a category of its own. Apple’s range jumps from the 17” model up to the 22” Cinema Display. Sitting nicely in the middle is the Gallery 2010. It’s native resolution is larger than that of Apple’s Cinema Display. At 1600 x 1200 pixels, it provides 17% more screen space. In fact, the vertical resolution is the same as in Apple’s Cinema HD 23” display.
Another important difference is that both of Apple’s high-end displays are wide-screen, a format increasingly favoured by professionals, especially those working with video. The 2010 uses the more traditional 4:3 ratio, which is ideal for illustration and page layout, and at these sorts of resolutions, you’ll have room to spare.
It only works fully with an AGP graphics card. You can use it with a PCI card, but only at its native resolution. With an AGP card, the scaling required to display lower resolutions is impressive, but the Gallery 2010 undoubtedly looks at its best at 1600dpi x 1200dpi.
The Gallery’s power must still be provided separately, but it uses a cunning device called, imaginatively, the Formac Display Connector (FDC). This is a small box near the end of the video cable which the power supply plugs into. This means there is still only one cable in the back of the display, keeping things neat and tidy.
Formac aimed the 2010 at creative professionals and included a top-notch LCD panel from Fujitsu, which uses a technology called Multi-Domain Vertical Alignment (MVA) Premium, to provide greater colour purity, higher brightness and contrast, and minimal ghosting with moving images. It really lives up to these claims, with truly excellent image quality for text, graphics and video. It conforms to Pantone colour standards, so can be accurately calibrated. Importantly, it boasts an extremely wide viewing angle, which means that the colours on the screen don’t distort, even when viewed from an extreme angle, either from side to side or up and down
