Iiyama AS4332UT

When you can buy Iiyama's AS4332UT for £579, it seems incredible that people were once willing to pay £2,000 for a 17-18in TFT screen. Even a year ago, when we last rounded up 17-18in TFT displays in a group test (see Labs, issue 80, p127), the average price was around £1,100.

Our surprise isn't just the price. The similarly specified Mitac 17AES (see Reviews, issue 91, p132) we reviewed last month cost £499, but proved to be a disappointment. However, the AS4332UT (sold on various online sites as the AS4332U) is in a different class. For starters, it has two DVI-I inputs as opposed to the Mitac's single captive D-SUB input. DVI-I guarantees crystal-clear focus when hooked up to a digital signal, but also supports analog signals if you happen to have an analog-only graphics card. Iiyama generously supplies the appropriate cable, one for DVI-to-DVI, and even one for taking advantage of the composite video input.

The integrated USB hub is another great bonus. It's a common feature in Iiyama TFT screens, although we're used to seeing the hub fitted into the stand rather than the screen itself. This is useful for those wishing to wall-mount this display, but does make the USB ports themselves much less convenient to access. In fact, it was the main reason we were grateful for this monitor's pivot feature, as it makes the bottom-mounted ports easier to reach.

But it's not just its features that earn the AS4332UT such praise. It's also an excellent screen. When hooked up to a DVI source, it produced strong results in almost all our checks, with its best results coming in the real-world section of our tests. For example, it coped easily in our action-packed game test and fared admirably when used for DVD playback; this was no surprise considering a response time of 35ms. The contrast ratio of 350:1 coupled with good viewing angles - Iiyama quotes 160 degrees for both the vertical and horizontal - helps the screen to look evenly lit, where some TFTs look darker at the sides.

In fact, the AS4432UT's only real fault is colour accuracy - not a great strength of TFTs in general, anyway. Its biggest problem is that it accentuates the primary colours, leaving you with a slightly inaccurate image. But we only discovered this when testing using DisplayMate MultiMedia Edition 2 (available from www.displaymate.com); it's unlikely you'll ever notice problems in real-world use.

As an analog screen, the AS4332UT is slightly more ordinary. Although it automatically adjusts the phase, clock and positioning as soon as you connect the source, there's the inevitable fuzziness around line edges.

This mild disappointment aside, it's difficult to criticise this monitor. Yes, it only has a viewable diagonal measuring 17in as opposed to the 18in of the NEC MultiSync LCD 1880SX (see Reviews, issue 90, p130), but the thin-looking bezel helps to nullify this advantage. Our advice is simple: buy it. The only difficulty is choosing between the white version of the screen or black, both of which cost the same, startlingly low amount of money.

Author: Tim Danton