Albatron L17AT 17'': Putting the TV in LCD

OSD and controls

The On Screen Display provided us with all the functionality needed.  Our primary of impression of the OSD was slightly awkward, but generally practical.  The interface itself is very Spartan; don’t expect to see any neat graphics on the OSD.  Even though there is no set standard for the text on an OSD, we were a little surprised to see some deviant of “Times New Roman.”  Even more curious was the inconsistency of this font.  Occasionally one letter would appear a little lighter than another.  Even though Albatron’s choice of wording gets the message across, it is also sometimes a little strange.  Depressing the “Auto” button pops up a window with the text “doing.”  Certainly, none of these little oddities hurt the performance of the monitor, but they do demonstrate Albatron’s youth in this sort of manufacturing.

All of the controls on the OSD were provided through five buttons inconveniently located on the bottom of the bezel.  When the OSD is not on, the middle two buttons also function as the volume control for the onboard speakers and the speaker output.  The four basic buttons were “auto”, “up”, “down” and “menu” and “power”.  A single multicolor LED provides signal status (red for no signal, green for signal ok). 

Typically poor placement of OSD controls drastically hurt our impression of a monitor.  When we put a keyboard in front of the LCD, it was very difficult to press any of the buttons.  Fortunately, the L17AT’s saving grace comes in the form of a 3” remote control.  There are not many monitors on the market that come with a remote, so this new feature caught us a little off guard.  The remote provided the same 5 buttons located underneath the monitor, plus several others including Volume, Channel and Input functions.  The remote was a huge improvement over adjusting the menu options by hand.  The buttons on the remote were just a little difficult to depress sometimes though.  A higher quality remote might have gone a long way on our impression of the L17AT.