ViewSonic VX2435wm review

For under £500, you could do much worse than this massive 24-inch widescreen LCD monitor.

Strengths
The box includes everything you need -- just park the stand on the desk and the screen slots straight into it. The piano-black surrounds a silvery finish to the stand and the curved menu buttons provide the style.

Around the back you'll find VGA and HDMI inputs, along with audio and video component RCA sockets. There's an S-Video socket, too, and a 3.5mm mini-jack. Power comes from a standard mains lead that plugs directly into the unit -- there's no separate power adaptor. The whole thing weighs only 8kg, so it's fairly easy to set up.

The screen offers a native resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels at 60Hz, and a display area of 570 by 510mm. It has a creditable 8-millisecond response time and is claimed to consume 90W in use and under 1W in standby mode.

Weaknesses
The pair of built-in 3W speakers make a convincing sound, although inevitably they're not as good as a dedicated system. We'd quibble with the lack of adjustment. The bottom of the display area sits about 170mm off the desktop and you can neither raise nor lower it, although it does tilt. We'd prefer the ability to lower it just a few millimetres.

It can also be a little tricky to see the inlaid legends for the input sockets -- although most are self-evident.

Conclusion
Overall, we found very little to fault the VX2435wm. The anti-glare screen coating works well and there's very little smearing when playing back fast-paced video. The menus use ViewSonic's standard layout and are easy to operate.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday