ViewSonic VP2650wb review

Just as the 22in TFT usurped its 20in sibling, so we're seeing more and more 26in models appear as the industry decides 24 desktop inches just aren't enough. The latest comes from ViewSonic, and it's aimed firmly at the upper end of the market.

The VP2650wb is a real beast of a monitor, with a foot-span almost as wide as the screen itself and a body far deeper than most TFTs. This may be due to the screen technology involved: unlike previous 26in models we've seen, the ViewSonic is capable of displaying 110% of the NTSC colour gamut, placing it in the eye of the creative professionals among you.

Hooking it up via the DVI port, it's instantly evident that these is not the washed out ViewSonic palette we're used to seeing. The jungles of Crysis were almost blinding, so intense was the 400cd/m2 backlight and the saturation of the greens and blues on show. Contrast was tremendous, with detail clearly visible at both ends of the light scale, and this helped to neutralise the drawback of a 26in, 1,920 x 1,200 display's enlarged pixels.

But things certainly weren't perfect. For a start, we struggled to find a colour mode that didn't have issues: sRGB was bizarrely dark, even at maximum brightness, while the usual fallback of 6,500K produced a nasty green hue that we just couldn't put up with. Instead we chose User mode and had to manually tweak the colours to remove the cold tone, and still had to lower both brightness and contrast significantly to bring the various shades of grey out of the white background. This still left the ViewSonic with visible backlight bleed at the top and bottom, and the top half of the screen looked darker than the bottom - finding a comfortable viewing angle wasn't easy at all.

It's hard to see this appealing to entertainment fans, despite the flawless gradient ramps and a dynamic contrast mode that works surprisingly unnoticeably. The price is the other major stumbling block, as no one but design professionals should be shelling out £375 for this when Iiyama's E2607WS - albeit without the adjustable stand - will be almost as pleasing to gamers at more than £100 cheaper. In today's market of plumetting prices, the ViewSonic is an expensive luxury that, unfortunately, has a few too many issues to justify its price.

Author: David Bayon