ViewSonic VA2213w

...monitor came in a large Viewsonic box, well padded with polystyrene. The base comes separately but easily clips on to the bottom of the stand, and the first impression the monitor gives is a good one. I was amazed at the size of it - if you are moving up from a 17", it is huge! The quality feels good, with a stylish thin black bezel, rounded base and simple easy-to-use silver buttons. When connected, a blue LED in the middle of the buttons lights ...
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Overall, the Viewsonic VA2213w is, basically, a bargain. It performs excellently in both everyday use and for gaming, has a huge 21.5" viewable area, and costs only just over £100 delivered (at the time of writing). Don't, however, expect the ultimate monitor - for the price some comprimises have to be made.
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With my old monitor on the way out, I decided to jump on the current trend and buy a new, widescreen monitor. Having previously only ever owned monitors with a 4:3 ratio (the traditional square shape), I was a bit apprehensive about moving to a widescreen 16:9 ratio.

Having a rather small budget, my first choices were all much smaller 17" and 19" monitors. However, as soon as I saw this monitor on dabs.com for only £104.48 on special offer with free delivery (although it has now fallen by a further pound), which was a mere £20 more than I was planning on spending anyway, I decided to try my luck.

I have previously owned 2 Viewsonics, and have been very impressed with both of them - they were high end models in their ranges though, while this is a much more basic affair.

Despite the low price, the specifications looked promising. Most notable is the 22" size (21.5" viewable), which is nearly as big as my TV! The monitor has a 1920x1080 resolution - this is also known as "Full HD", and allows the monitor to show more detail than other cheaper monitors. A response time of 5ms promises a lack of "ghosting" in games - this is where, in fast paced scenes such as in movies, the pixels in the monitor cannot change colour fast enough, thus leaving a faint copy of the image in its previous position!

The one sign that the VA2213w is indeed a value monitor is the single VGA input. More expensive monitors will have at least a DVI input, and many now come with HDMI connectors to connect to DVD players, games consoles, etc. The difference between DVI and VGA image quality is often argued - theoretically, as DVI is a digital signal and VGA an analog one (and therefore has to be converted twice, once before it leaves the PC and once when it reaches the monitor) DVI should display a better quality picture with less interference, although the difference is often not noticable.

The monitor came in a large Viewsonic box, well padded with polystyrene. The base comes separately but easily clips on to the bottom of the stand, and the first impression the monitor gives is a good one. I was amazed at the size of it - if you are moving up from a 17", it is huge! The quality feels good, with a stylish thin black bezel, rounded base and simple easy-to-use silver buttons. When connected, a blue LED in the middle of the buttons lights up, but it isn't too bright luckily. A power cable and VGA cable come supplied, along with a thin instruction manual which covers everything from clipping on the base to setting it up. There is also a CD with a more extensive manual and some drivers.

After connecting up the monitor to my PC and setting the resolution, I had expected it to work immediately - however, the image on the monitor didn't fill it completely! After a couple of minutes of panicking, I noticed there was an "Auto-Adjust" button on the monitor, labelled as "2". After clicking on it, the image improved dramatically and filled the screen.

To test the monitor, I carried out 3 basic tasks, which were as follows:

General use (Web browsing, document editing, etc)

The big change moving from a small screen to a widescreen is the amount of space on screen. I found myself being able to fit two pages of a document side by side while zoomed in, or I could edit a Word document on one half of the screen while browsing the web on the second half.

In terms of actual performance, the monitor displays crisp whites, although the backlight isn't terribly right - I had to set it at 90 out of 100. This will mean that as the backlight fades over time it isn't possible to keep increasing the brightness for very long, although that's a very long term problem. (several years).

Text in documents and in web browsing is clear, and I didn't have any problems such as flickering. Even after several hours of use, my eyes felt fine too.

Gaming

To test this, I loaded up Call of Duty 4, which is a fast paced first person shooter with lots of explosions and different effects. The VA2213w coped very well, but there were situations where ghosting (like a shadow due to the monitor not updating fast enough) was obvious, but not obvious enough to wreck the experience.

Colour Chart Tests

For this rather artificial tests, I looked at different colour charts available on the "Lagom LCD test" website - these show colour charts fading from black to red/blue/green/white/etc, showing how well the monitor performs in displaying different colours.

Using default settings only (I couldn't get any significant improvements by changing the contrast or options), colours were displayed very well - dark blues tend to band to black, but all other shades were fine. Whites tended to saturate quite quickly (i.e. hard to distinguish between very light greys and whites)

These tests really won't affect most people (it's more for photographers) but I thought I'd do them to allow different monitors to be compared.

Moving on from the monitor tests, the VA2213w comes with a 3 year warranty, which is promising. There is a risk of dead pixels - it is only possible to return if there are a number (depending on the 'type' between 3 and 8 usually), so if you really don't want a dead pixel buy a higher end monitor with a more extensive warranty.

Overall, the Viewsonic VA2213w is, basically, a bargain. It performs excellently in both everyday use and for gaming, has a huge 21.5" viewable area, and costs only just over £100 delivered (at the time of writing). Don't, however, expect the ultimate monitor - for the price some comprimises have to be made.
 

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