The BenQ V2400 Eco is a 24inch 1080p monitor with LED backlighting. It is designed to be environmentally friendlier while also offering excellent image quality and design.
We ran it through its paces and have no real complaints with it at all. It passed all our tests with flying colours. We weren’t too fond of the design but our assessment of the aesthetics of the unit is purely subjective.
The monitor has an all white look that give it a very Apple feel. It has a DSub port at the rear and a HDMI connection so you can hook up both analogue and digital sources. We tested with a notebook connected via HDMI and also connected via DSub to see if there was any quality drop. Thankfully, the analogue connection still produced excellent image quality so if you don’t have a HDMI port or a DVI to HDMI conversion cable, you can still take advantage of the strengths of this unit.
At the default settings, the image quality was reasonably mediocre. We spent some time navigating the menus and tweaking the settings to achieve optimal quality. We also used the DisplayMate Video Edition test patterns to finely calibrate the unit. Once it was set up correctly, we were blown away with how good it looked. The colour was accurate and blacks were pure. The blend along the greyscale showed no stepping and no Magenta or Cyan discolouration.
We also connected a Samsung P1500 Blu-ray player and viewed various films to check the image quality and how well the monitor handled motion. When watching Blu-ray movies, the motion was quite good. Naturally, this isn’t a TV but the response rate was good enough to offer a fairly good movie watching experience. This would translate to gaming quite well, especially fast paced games like first person shooters.
The V2400 doesn’t have any speakers but it does have a 3.5mm headphone jack. If you are running a HDMI sound source, the audio can be accessed via the headphone jack.
The reactions to the design are divided within the Smarthouse offices. Some love it and some don’t. The green thing you see in the images is a card holder and why this was included is somewhat puzzling. However, like most design arguments, beauty is the eye of the beholder. As far as performance goes, this is definitely a monitor to look out for.
