Product Reviews

Until very recently, 19in widescreen monitors were a good choice if you wanted to save money. Now, 20in and 22in models are similarly priced and offer better value.

The 22in H-W22 has a 1,680x1,050-pixel native resolution, which gives you plenty of space to work with and is ideal for applications such as video editing software. Alternatively, you could use a fast graphics card to fill all those pixels with lots of extra detail in games.

The grey-to-grey response time of 3ms should make this monitor ideal for gaming. First impressions were fine, with no appreciable smearing or blurring of motion, and no input lag. However, our tests showed that the HannsG Hi221D deals better with fast-moving onscreen objects.

Image quality was more than acceptable in Windows, with sharp text beneath the icons on the desktop. However, it has a 1,000:1 contrast ratio and lacks the dynamic contrast control of

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the LG Flatron L227WT. This makes the L227WT better for displaying the dark scenes often found in movies or games, as it can reduce its backlight brightness to show subtle changes in colour.

The default colour settings were a little yellow, so we used a monitor calibration device to help us tweak them. This led us to reduce the red and blue colour temperatures by five points each. With this done, colours looked great for a budget model, with highly realistic skin tones in our tests.

The black bezel is fairly slender, but thickens at the bottom to accommodate a pair of 2W stereo speakers. These are fairly typical for a monitor and only good for Windows warning sounds or listening to Radio 4. The stand is small, and the bottom of the screen sits only 93mm above the desk. You may have to place it on a second stand to bring it up to eye level for comfortable viewing.

On the rear it has both DVI and VGA inputs, although you'd expect these at this price. The auto setup on the VGA input worked perfectly, making it indistinguishable from the DVI input. The DVI input supports HDCP for displaying protected content, such as Blu-ray movies. It will accept a 1080p HD input, and although it can't display the full resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels, the results were still sharp.

The H-W22 is a decent monitor with no serious flaws. However, it's not as impressive out of the box as LG's Flatron L227WT, and even once tweaked it's still not quite its equal in response times or contrast.