X-bit labs

20" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part IV (page 7)

Category: Other

by Oleg Artamonov

[ 09/07/2007 | 10:38 AM ]

The monitor’s got 90% brightness and 50% contrast by default. Choosing 60% brightness and 42% contrast results in a 100nit brightness of white.

Alas, I found some problems with the monitor’s image quality even when evaluating it with my own eyes. First, the Sharpness option works incorrectly even for the monitor’s DVI connection. You may be surprised at the very existence of an option to adjust sharpness for a digital signal, so here’s the explanation: this setting is in fact equivalent to your image editor’s Unsharp Mask and Blur filters when you increase and decrease it, respectively. Alas, the difference between these two modes is vague on the FP202W V2. The monitor produces a somewhat fuzzy image at one position of the Sharpness slider (when connected via DVI!) but when you increase it by one step, there appear light contours around black lines – this artifact should be familiar to every photographer who has overdone it with the Unsharp Mask filter when processing his photos. In other words, I could not make this monitor produce just a sharp picture without any artifacts.

Gray color on FP202W V2 screen

The next problem is about the color temperature modes. Besides the user-defined mode, the monitor offers Bluish, Normal and Reddish variants. The first two are more or less acceptable but the latter mode doesn’t make the image warm. It makes the image… pink! I can illustrate it with the photograph of different levels of gray on the screen of the monitor you can see above (the photo was captured in RAW format and I converted it into JPEG basing the white balance on the rightmost square that had corresponded to white on the monitor’s screen).

And now let’s proceed to objective measurements.

The gamma curves aren’t that bad, yet the gamma value is obviously too high (the curves go lower than they should), resulting in a darker and higher-contrast image than necessary. This is the only problem here, though. The monitor reproduces both lights and darks normally.

After the demonstration of a beautiful, yet absolutely unnatural, pink instead of gray, you can’t expect the color temperature measurements to produce good results. Indeed, white is 1500K colder than gray in the Reddish mode and, on the contrary, about 1000K warmer than it in the Normal mode (I want to remind you that higher color temperatures are perceived by the eye as colder colors and vice versa).

The monitor’s response time average is 13.1 milliseconds with a maximum of 28.3 milliseconds. From a practical point of view the FP202W V2 with its specified response of 8 milliseconds isn’t much different from TN-based monitors with a specified response of 5 milliseconds (whose response average falls within 13-15 milliseconds, too) and is many times slower than monitors with a specified response time of 2 or 4 milliseconds.

The contrast ratio is rather low, even for a TN matrix, hardly above 250:1 in one of the test modes.

I guess the only thing that may be attractive in the BenQ FP202W V2 is its low price. Otherwise the monitor’s characteristics range from mediocre to bad. It’s got an unassuming exterior design, inconvenient controls, average image quality, and a slow matrix with narrow viewing angles. It can only be used for working with text documents. You should look elsewhere if you want a more universal monitor.