Iiyama Pro Lite E430S

I bought one of these way back ( a couple of years ago) and they were much dear back then but I wanted a reliable brand. For the price it was compromise between size, brand reliability and specification.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The monitor came out of the box neatly packaged and was supplied with the cables all cables and was a joke to set it up. The annoying bit is that XP doesn't recognise it (well it loads the default TFT drives which work fine) and there is no drivers CD with it.

The manual is slightly patronising (how difficult to connect the power, speakers and a monitor lead could be) and the only useful bit of information in there was that the drivers should be downloaded from the website. God know why a CD with this drivers it is not included. (Maybe newer releases do but mine didn't).

INSTALL

As I don't like having unrecognised devices installed on my computer I went to the Iiyama website (well actually after playing Call of Duty: United Offensive on that, which I found a pleasure to play even though the colours were a bit dull, especially the black not being inky). The Iiyama website was confusing and took a lot of clicking to get to the drivers (the UK ones) and after you download a zip file which actually holds all of the Iiyama drivers for every Iiyama monitor since the conception of the company.

Weird as it asks you to navigate to the product you have with pin-sharp accuracy but you still end up downloading the whole of the range.

After this you have to update with the driver not via a simple setup install-shield but you have to update driver (which is not digitally signed, grrr MS) manually and this is only via the display properties -> Settings -> monitor and update; via system doesn't work.

Anyway after much loitering with Iiyama the improvement on the picture and behaviours was....yup you guessed it: ZILCH!
Well I kinda lied as now the PC says Iiyama monitor as opposed to Default monitor, suppose it is better.

SPEC

The screen is responsive and is quite fast at 8ms but there are faster beasts out there now. The casing is made of plastic (grey) to imitate silver/aluminium but this can be seen mile away. The bezels though on the other end are thin enough to make the screen look bigger in some sort of optical illusion.

The buttons included are a MENU, UP and DOWN keys as well as AUTO which is the best button a monitor could include.

The resolution that it can take is a maximum of 1280x1040 which is the resolution I run it under (with an Ati 9800 Pro). This works fine and the refresh rates are good and games like Call of Duty and Far Cry play smoothly. My problem is with the colour temperature though, I would prefer a more deep colouring (which Iiyama CRT are renown for) but this only gives washed out colours and no amount of tuning (brightness/contrast/colour temp) is going to resolve that. It is indeed a far cry from for example Sony's X-Black screen.

The build quality though is marvellous, never had a problem, been always on constantly for 16 hours a day, for years now and still going. Only one pixel missing (that promptly disappeared) but never rang Iiayama even though they have a one pixel replacement policy.

The monitor even though is plastic it feels sturdy and it can take a lot of punishment and doesn't seem to care. Mine has had more than its fair share of moving house and being thrown around but it still goes.

All in all is a good monitor but severely outclassed now, but then again for the price it goes now there might still be life in the old chap.