There are plenty of benefits to be had from a flatpanel LCD/TFT monitor. First, if you don't have much desk room, there are practical benefits in having a slimline, tubeless screen that doesn't bulge out and take over your study or living room. Second, they are a lot easier on the eye and let you work without the annoying flicker from which even the best standard screen suffers. Third, they look good.

The traditional drawback for most people has been the elevated cost of this kind of hardware. The CTX Panoview PV411S is sold as a budget model, but at £680 it's still expensive for a 14.1in screen. This figure was given to us by the manufacturer as a recommended street price, and will doubtless be bettered by many resellers when the product hits the shelves. Also, LCD monitors tend to be described in "true" measurements, so the viewable pane really does measure 14.1in and is the same as the viewable area of most 15in standard monitors.

The monitor is designed to work at a screen resolution of 1024x768 which isn't what we would recommend for a traditional 15in monitor, but works well on a flatpanel display. If you really must have your screen resolution at 800x600, perhaps because you like the bigger icons and buttons, then you'll be disappointed. At that resolution, the monitor suffered from some blurred characters and generally looked pretty poor.

The PV411S looks good and at only 12.9cm deep it's never going to devour space the way that a standard desktop monitor does. On the front panel there are some easy-to-navigate controls that look after brightness, contrast and so on. The screen connects to a standard VGA port on your graphics card, so you won't have to upgrade to one with the latest digital connections.

Setting the Panoview up is a little bit fiddly, since both the power cable and the lead to connect the monitor to your PC fit in a slot on its rear and have to be threaded through a hole in the stand.

Thoughtfully, the PV411S comes fitted with four additional USB ports for adding extra peripherals to your PC. This can be particularly handy if your system only came with two USB sockets and you plan on adding a few more devices to your computer.