- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 6 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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4.0 stars
"Good monitor for most consumers, but poor high-end features."
Pros: Very cheap compared to competition and good response time, contrast, and brightness.
Cons: Low refresh rate, matte screen, bulky, and colors aren't realistic.
Summary: I got this monitor with a desktop bundle. My previous monitor was a 20" Sceptre, standard ratio.
First impressions on this monitor were positive. The screen size is enough for any consumer and the resolution is fine enough for anything non-professional. I never saw any ghosting, although I rarely play games. The one knock I have on the physical specifications is the low refresh rate. At full 1680x1050 the maximum is 60 Hz using a dual-link DVI port. You will notice the flicker if your spend more than an hour on this monitor. I've had many a headache when reading ebooks or news articles and especially when editing video. My old Sceptre would run 75 Hz and I would never have any problems when doing prolonged tasks.
Movie viewing is fine; black levels aren't excellent, but I always turn down the contrast and brightness. The screen is extremely bright. I only keep it at 74/100. At 100, it's like looking into the sun. I wish the screen was glossy. The colors are alright, but they don't pop in any sense of the word, even after finely tuning the gamma settings.
Text is sharp and fine for the resolution. The widescreen helps tremendously when editing several documents, but it gets confusing having more than one spreadsheet open.
I'm not sure if this is a problem with all large monitors, but vertical color inversion is a problem. Perhaps it is because the screen is so massive. There is a sweet spot for color accuracy, and it's very narrow. Sitting about 3-4 feet away, the range is about 600 pixels, vertically. Outside that, you will see some color inversion. I've also seen this on other 22"-24" monitors, but not on 30" screens from HP and Dell.
Overall, I'd recommend this for home use. But if you need an office monitor, I'd stick with one of HP's LP series or Dell's Ultrasharps. The refresh rate on the w22 is a deal breaker if you have to look at it for 8 hours a day.
