Product Reviews

BenQ's G2400WA is the cheapest 24in widescreen LCD we've seen. Unfortunately, this is reflected in its styling and features. It has a plastic-looking brushed silver surround and a stand that feels flimsy. It isn't height adjustable, and there's no pivot or swivel either. It also has only a D-sub input.

However, if you're looking for an affordable monitor that can display full 1080p high-definition video, none of this may matter. Other monitors manage a crisp display over VGA. However the G2400WA isn't quite up top scratch.The Windows desktop looked a little soft, and text wasn't as sharply defined as we'd like, but these are minor gripes. It excelled in games. We didn't detect any blurring or ghosting no matter how fast-paced the action. You'll need a powerful graphics card to run games at the native resolution of 1,920x1,200, but detail is exquisite.

The analogue input means there's no

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support for HDCP. If you're editing high-definition video from a camcorder, this won't be a problem. Sadly, we weren't too impressed with the G2400WA's quality when watching our HD test clips. It couldn't retain detail in dark areas, and colours were oversaturated when using the movie mode.

There are four other presets: standard, sRGB, photo and dynamic. However, none of these produced decent image quality. Colours were undersaturated in standard mode, while the photo preset brought out the sharp definition in pictures with high contrast, but left colours looking unnatural. We were able to improve on this after making our own adjustments, but skin tones still looked a little ruddy.

BenQ quotes viewing angles of 160 degrees horizontally and vertically. This is quite low, and in practice we found it even worse than these figures indicate. Just moving our head slightly away from the middle of the screen resulted in a darkening of the image and a lost of colour. The backlight isn't brilliant, either. Our white-screen test, which fills the display with pure white, appeared bright in the middle, but slightly grey around the edges.

The G4200WA turned out to be exactly what we feared: a 24in, full HD widescreen display that simply cuts too many corners to be good value. If you want to watch 1080p movies and edit your own HD video, we'd recommend that you spend an extra £70 on Samsung's 245B. This has much better image quality, more features and is HDCP-compliant.