Iiyama ProLite PLE2008HDSV review

As the value option of Iiyama's 20in family, the PLE2008HDSV clocks in at a remarkable £89 - a price barely higher than the few remaining 17in and 19in TFTs on the market. It's very much aiming to be the baseline for home TFTs, and as a result it's bare of all but the necessities: a single VGA port, a fixed stand and some basic 1W speakers make up the feature set.

Neither the wide stand nor the glossy black body looks or feels cheap, though, and the analogue signal was picked up and auto-adjusted without a hitch on our test PC. Straight away, though, the Iiyama's main weakness becomes evident: it just isn't bright enough. The 250cd/m2 backlight is the compromise that gets you that low price, and it prevents the display from ever packing the sort of punch that makes movies vibrant and your desktop sparkle.

That lack of brightness really showed during entertainment, with even our most dazzling clip, Wall-E, appearing muted. Video looked grainy and some colours - particularly red - had a dirty tone to them that we couldn't eliminate. Meanwhile, the dynamic contrast in Movie mode swung up and down far too noticeably to be useful.

Another issue was the reproduction of very small text, with a lack of sharpness that caused characters to break into one another. And the 1,600 x 900 resolution is an odd one, capable of displaying 720p video but too far from it to do so natively without black bars on all sides.

But for all that, it still isn't a bad monitor. Colours were generally accurate - only greys had a slight hint of red to them - and fast motion was handled without stuttering thanks to a 2ms response time. We noticed slight banding in our gradient ramps, but nothing major, and aside from a very small amount of backlight bleed at the bottom, the black level was deep and the backlight even.

If videos and photos make a regular appearance on your screen, just a few notes more will get you something with a vastly more usable panel. But for everyday web browsing, emailing and office work, the flaws don't matter too much, and at £89 the PLE2008HDSV is certainly a very enticing price.

Author: David Bayon