BenQ FP222Wa

Author's product rating:   

Picture quality	Excellent
Colour sensitivity	Excellent
Design	Excellent
Ease of use	Very easy
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Good brightness, solid stand, no speakers
Disadvantages:	The buttons are hidden along one of the sides

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

It used to be that whenever you bought a monitor you always had to think carefully about what your needs were, did you need space or speed, were you after longevity or good colour reproduction?

Now we don't care half so much about any of these features simply because ever monitor available does good colours, is reliable and doesn't have problems with shadowing. (Shadowing used to be a problem with TFT's in that because of a slower refresh rate due to the changes in current in each cell your old images could be seen as a shadow in newer ones)

At the moment what people are looking for in the TFT market are some simple numbers which compare each screen to ever other screen many of them don't matter but the ones that do are shown below:

Contrast ratio, simply put the widest contrast variance between two cells. For this monitor the value quoted is 700:1, that's pretty good baring in mind that some monitors go as low as 300:1 but some go as high at 850:1. With this number your looking for a big as possible value compared to the one.

Response time, the time it takes a cell to change colour. The faster the better. 5ms for this device.

Brightness, I'm not going to explain this one, once again you need a big as possible number for this device its 300cd/m.

The maximum screen resolution is1680*1050.

I genuinely like this monitor. I think it wasn't over priced (£200), its got good build quality, its made by a respected company, the colours are excellent (so much so its making the older monitor I use as my other screen look like it needs binning) and the stand is solid. Its got all the standard features such as TCO03 compliance (a technical standard) and low power settings. The one draw back to my mind is that the buttons are hidden at the side with the symbols for their use out of sight unless you pull the monitor out to have a good look.

One thing to be aware of with TFT monitors if your buying online however. Always buy them from a UK supplier and ignore their dead pixel returns policy. Many places say you need a minimum of 10 dead pixels for them to take the monitor back, this is wrong and they are acting illegally. You can send them back with just one dead pixel. This is why its important to buy from within the UK because even though you bought it online the distance selling rules and UK trade law apply fully.