Asus VW223B in Monitors
Verdict
A great way to extend your desktop once you're out of DVI ports, but this is not a monitor we'd recommend using as your primary display.
Review Date: 2 Jul 2008
Price when reviewed: £177 (£204 inc VAT)
Buy it now for: £170.80
Overall Rating

Features & Design

Value for Money

Image Quality

With spreadsheets, documents, browsers and emails on the go, most of us at PC Pro have cobbled together whatever ageing monitors we can find to give us dual-display working environments. But once you've plugged in two TFTs, adding more is either a pain or simply impossible.
The answer, according to Asus, lies not in buying more graphics cards, but in sending the image via USB instead. Connect its EZlink-enabled VW223B to your PC using the provided USB cable, install the driver from the CD when prompted, and it's ready to go. An EZLink icon sits in the system tray, and with a quick click you can control what's output to the monitor, from straightforward mirroring to extending the desktop.
We fired up DisplayMate to test the picture quality, and the results were good. The black level is deep, gradients smooth, and the 3,000:1 dynamic contrast meant we could distinguish the final few shades at both ends of the scale. The 300cd/m2 brightness doesn't result in perfect bright white screens, though - it has a slight green tinge that we couldn't remove.
But EZLink's real weakness is that USB has much lower bandwidth than DVI or VGA. Load up video or a 3D game and you'll see why USB 2 won't be challenging DVI anytime soon. Even an older game such as Call of Duty 2 is rendered up to a second slower on the Asus than on a normal monitor. And when we tried maximising the most basic low-resolution video clips, we found they stuttered to the point of being unwatchable.
It's clearly not suitable for any sort of entertainment, but in a multi-monitor setup that's not an issue: just make sure you watch video on your main DVI monitor and use the Asus as an Outlook screen, or for web browsing. If you really want to go to town, you can daisy-chain up to six of the things from a single USB port on your PC.
The Asus VW223B won't be for everyone and we wouldn't advise using it as a primary monitor either, especially as it only has a VGA input to supplement the USB. But for anyone looking to extend their desktop without splashing out on a new graphics card, it's an ingenious idea.
Author: David Bayon
Latest Prices for VW223B
| Seller | Price | Buy Now | Seller Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
![]() |
£170.80 |
|
advertisement
- Q&A: Why Conficker was a victim of its own success
- App developers losing faith in Android
- Biz Stone: Murdoch's Google veto will "fail fast"
- Google adds automatic captions to YouTube
- China ramps up cyber spying
- Mozilla maintains dependence on Google
- Windows 7 flying off the shelves
- Google Chrome OS: full details unveiled
- AOL slashes 2,500 jobs
- YouTube begins streaming full-length shows
- Why Britain's watchdogs have fewer teeth than goldfish
- Tabbed documents: how to make Office 2010 great
- Outlook 2010 People Pane – does it spell death to Xobni
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 screenshots
- Co-Authoring in Word 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010
- Microsoft Outlook 2010 screenshots: Backstage view
- Flash 10.1: Developing for Desktop and Device
- Microsoft Office 2010 screenshots: Recover unsaved items
- Microsoft Word 2010 screenshots: Text Effects
- Microsoft Word 2010: inserting screenshots
- The sci-fi legends who shaped today's tech
- Conficker's first birthday: how a year of havoc unfolded
- When will you get superfast broadband?
- The Crapware Con
- The 10 greatest tech U-turns
- Windows 7: everything you need to know
- PC 2010 and beyond
- The High Street Rip Off
- How to avoid the high-street rip-offs
- Do online protests really work?
- Getting to grips with Microsoft's IT Health Environment Scanner
- Virtualise your servers
- The changing face of travel gadgets
- Build your own distributed file system
- The bulletproof Dell that costs an arm and a leg
- Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview: Q&A
- Lawnmowers, the TyTN II and one odd insurance request
- There'll never be a bulletproof OS
- How far can we trust apps?
- Five nice touches in Outlook 2010
advertisement
Printed from www.pcpro.co.uk



