Digital Trends

Hy-Tek Tek Panel 300

May 17th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Performance and Gaming Experience 

As you can imagine, we tested the Tek Panel as often as we could. We watched DVDs, browsed the Web, used office applications and of course, played games.

DVDs were crisp and highly detailed. The Tek Panel handled all movies and genres we threw at it without any skipping or ghosting issues.

The Tek Panel brings online multiplayer gaming to a new level. There's just something extremely satisfying playing Call of Duty on a 30-inch widescreen display with all of the lights off and five speakers surrounding you.

As can be expected from a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and an ATI Radeon 9800XT, this machine handled all of the games we tried on it with relative ease. Call of Duty, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004, Painkiller and every other game we tried played smooth and looked great. The game detail was very sharp and crisp and we didn't notice any ghosting, which often occurs with LCDs when used for gaming.

And talk about immersive: Painkiller is a scary enough game on a regular gaming rig — try it on the Tek Panel with all the lights off and either headphones or surround sound speakers pumping and we guarantee you'll be jumping out of your seat.

Game maps loaded incredibly fast, and we were always the first to load a new map in the Call of Duty servers we played. The fastest processor (at the time) on the market and 2GB of RAM tends to do that for you.

As configured, our review Tek Panel 300 scored a very respectable 6629 in 3DMark 2003 with default settings.

Gaming on the Tek Panel 300 is intense. The display dwarfs this 19-inch CRT monitor.

The brightness of the display was an issue for us. The default brightness was just too much and even the darkest game scenes were too bright. With a completely black screen, the display threw off enough light to allow us to see without a problem in an otherwise completely dark room. Browsing the Web at first was painful. With the display so bright and most Web pages having a white background, we either had to reduce the brightness or use the Tek Panel with sunglasses. As you can imagine we opted for the former, and once adjusted, our eyes thanked us. The engineers at Hy-Tek told us that they run the backlights of that display at 70 percent normal brightness as it is. LG Electronics notes on their Website that this display is brighter than most and since Hy-Tek also markets the Tek Panel to companies for presentation purposes, it makes sense to use such a bright display.

We found the ideal viewing distance to be in the neighborhood of 3 ½ to 5-feet. For the test unit we used the free-standing detachable feet, and set it on a desk, towards the back of the work surface. Any closer and you'd have to move your head to look from one side to the other, instead of just moving your eyes.