So in other words, this monitor is a complete CRAP for it's price. 14ms seconds r.t.??? Yeah, try to play a game or fast action movie on that...I don't know why they still using those crappy panels instead of S-IPS???. For that price you can find an S-PVA Panel that is almost as fast as a TN and with the sharpness and color clarity as IPS ones...

Regarding the ECO-Mode:


There's a very simple reason: becasue it's perfect the way it is!
I've been using mine since a half year and initially I couldn't figure out how to set the min/max values for the automatic brightness adjustment. So I just left it at the brighter ones of the 2 ECO modes. And after a month or two I realized that I've never felt the need to adjust its brightness, be it lunch time on a sunny day or midnight with dimmed ambient light. It just works, and the brightness adjustment steps are so gentle you almost never notice them.

And regarding the response time: there are absolutely no visible artefacts in games or movies, so I don't care if TN panels can do 2 ms. It doesn't make a difference for me. However, what does make a huge difference is that the NEC "lacks" response time compensation. This is great!
My previous Viewsonic had a compensated PVA panel. When I switched to a wireless mouse I could feel the input lag painfully even during regular work, whereas the mouse worked just fine on TN panels. The EA231WMi is completely free from this problem. So I certainly prefer a slightly longer response time and no compensation over any other high quality panel with compensation.

And for the price the image quality is just excellent. Here you can get a (size-)comparable TN for 150 to 250€, whereas the EA231WMi can be had for 330€. S-IPS is in a complety different league, starting at 500 - 600€.
And my NEC easily provides the best image quality of all screens that I see "out in the wild". If people could see this difference live I could imagine them spending 75 - 150€ more compared to a TN panel. The advantage is simply amazing. However, I can not see them spending another 200 - 300€ for another slight improvement in the form of an S-IPS or whatever.

@TAViX,It was never meant to be a gamer's monitor, so why even bother to make this point?

And then there are the other whiners, who expect perfect performance at this price level. It's not a wide gamut monitor and you knew that before buying it. As for uneven color there are monitors that cost twice as much and have this problem.

Get real people.