Iiyama PLE2202WS-B2 review

At £157, Iiyama's brand-new PLE2202WS-B2 is firmly in the low-cost category populated by the Acer and Philips, but despite offering reasonable image quality at the price there's little else to justify the investment.

The black design is bland - all dark grey plastic with hardly a nod to the gods of aesthetic appeal - and elsewhere it's just as unremarkable. On the rear you'll find DVI and VGA connections, along with a 3.5mm minijack input for the integrated 2W speakers.

They're nothing special, either - fine for YouTube clips and a bit of light gaming but don't expect to be deafened by the big movie set pieces. That's it as far as external features go, and the OSD doesn't really add to the package: it's not particularly intuitive.

We didn't need to make too many adjustments out of the box, choosing the sRGB colour mode as the best fit, but even after tweaking things as best we could, the 300cd/m2 backlight just can't compete with the slightly dearer models here. This monitor is a little dim to say the least.

This was evident in our gradient ramps, with the lower intensity colours extending out further than most this month. The side effect of this is that the black level is pretty good, but our white test screen showed up a slight unevenness in the backlight around the edges.

All-in-all, this is not a bad monitor, it just fails to stand out this month. If you don't need the features go for the BenQ - it's significantly cheaper and image quality is similar. And if you're not worried about losing two inches you can pick up the superb LG for just £9 more.

Author: David Bayon