Product Reviews

Call us geeks, but it's difficult not to feel excited whenever a new Eizo monitor appears in the MacUser labs. It's not just that Eizo has exceeded expectations in the past, it's that it continues to do so.

The company has made its name in the past on the back of a string of phenomenal successes - monitors that we simply loved, and that any designer worth the title would be more than happy to have on their desk.

So the HD2441W, complete with its HD-heavy marketing, is cause for concern. HD, you see, doesn't need a particularly great monitor. 1080 isn't a particularly high vertical resolution, and the colour requirements for films are very different to the needs of creative professionals, where colour accuracy is far more important than simple vibrancy or saturation. The headline features also make the HD2441W sound like Eizo has gone to the cinema a few too many times. ContrastEnhancer and OutlineEnhancer are two technologies that by Eizo's admission, are plucked straight from its line of LCD TVs.

But, turn the panel on and load a few images and it's instantly clear that Eizo hasn't lost the plot. The panel is in a number of Eizo's other high-end TFTs, and the results, both from our real-world and technical tests, were little short of breathtaking. We ran a series of RGB colour ramps, and were rewarded with perfectly rendered colour from both the very darkest to the very lightest shades. Our ramps also ran with no signs of compression. Our contrast tests were a similar story - at both light and dark ends we found the Eizo capable of maintaining a visible distinction between similar shades.

Our real-world tests yielded similar results. Loading a series of Raw images from a Canon Eos 350D produced remarkably similar results to the professionally printed final images, and skin tones in particular rendered flawlessly.

The HD2441W gets its headline 6ms response time courtesy

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of an overdrive circuit, and although the human eye struggles to distinguish response times below around 24ms, the Eizo nonetheless excelled in our film tests. Colours, as we'd expected, rendered perfectly, and motion, even in fluid action scenes in The Matrix, was crisp and blur-free.

And it's video aficionados that Eizo is targeting. Besides its two HDMI ports (complete with HDCP encryption support), the HD2441W offers plenty for video experts. There's a picture-in-picture mode, for instance. This allows you to run one input at full screen, with another overlaying the top, turning the HD2441W into a kind of video KVM switch for those with multiple feeds. You can run a DVD while writing a document, for instance. Usefully, the overlaying feed can be adjusted for location and transparency, so you can get it where and how you want. And, for those in offices, Eizo's BrightRegulator automatically controls screen brightness depending on ambient light. It's a hassle-free way of keeping the screen visible if you work in an environment with a changing amount of light - such as by a window. It works well in practice, and it's subtle, too, so if someone opens a blind it doesn't overcompensate with a blinding glare of light.

Navigating the screen's myriad menus (there are six image modes for a start) is made reasonably simple by the touch-sensitive controls. The menus are controlled by a horizontal slider on the front panel, and while Eizo claims this simplifies the menus, in practice we found that the slightest brush on our review unit equalled an input, and we occasionally turned back to our desk to find a menu had appeared.

Besides those video inputs, you also get a USB hub built in, complete with a pair of downstream USB ports. We also appreciate the frankly amazing stand. Eizo understands that we creative types are a fussy bunch, and the stand is highly adjustable. Besides the freely-rotating base, you also get tilt plus height adjustment to make sure that your monitor is just so, without needing to resort to stacks of books underneath it.

The only problem is the price. It's true that this is a superb monitor, but even Eizo undercuts itself in the 24in widescreen market, offering plenty of non-HDMI screens for less. If you can convince yourself that you need the luxurious selection of ports, picture-in-picture facility and handy user-friendly extras, the HD2441W isn't going to disappoint. But more frugal designers will do well to investigate the rest of Eizo's range.