My HP w2408 was starting to get flaky after several years of use, and I decided to get a new monitor before it failed completely. After reading good reviews of this product, I jumped. In many respects the specs of this monitor were better than the one I was replacing. What could I lose?
What a disappointment!
First off: no DVI ports? What's up with that? I thought it was analog VGA that was going away.
Fortunately both my desktop (desk-under actually -- it's a middling gaming rig) and laptop have HDMI ports, but I had to buy a new HDMI KVM switch. VGA through an older KVM was noticeably worse. I don't know if it was the cables, the KVM switch, or the monitor -- but it was ugly. The monitor has two HDMI ports so I could connect both the laptop and the desktop until the new KVM switch arrived, but switching was a monumental pain. How do you have 3 ports on a monitor with no simple way to switch among them?
When I connected using an HDMI cable, the colors were so flat and dull that my heart sank. Even in movie mode, it was a poor match to the old monitor. (12,000,000 to one contrast ratio? Can't prove it by me.)
After fiddling around a couple of days with the monitor's control panel and my desktop's NVIDIA control panel, I finally got something that looks OK most of the time and even does a decent job on Skyrim, but I have yet to make Bejeweled 3's gems sparkle like they used to. The gems look flat and no amount of tweaking improves it. On my laptop I ran out of patience and left it looking kind of dull -- but it's a work machine anyway.
How does a monitor with default settings this bad leave the factory?
On the plus side, the monitor looks kind of sleek with the offset stand and it's thin and lightweight. On the negative side, actually USING the controls is awful. It took me nearly fifteen minutes just to figure out how to turn it on. The manual is no help and in fact is completely useless. Don't bother reading it. (The on-off switch is the top button on the stand, which doesn't look like it has buttons at all, and even then it will be hidden under the bottom lip of the monitor.)
Did I mention that the controls are awful? And like the proverbial restaurant with bad food where the portions are too small, there is not much you can do with the controls anyway. I had much better luck with the NVIDIA control panel on the PC. Hope your graphics card has good software utilities if you buy this.
I regret not having spent another hundred dollars or so, or settled for a smaller but better quality monitor for the same price. I can live with it now that it is adjusted JUST SO ... but I was expecting better.
| Standing screen display size | 27 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 |
| Graphics Coprocessor | No Information |
