Verdict: A decent price for a 22in TFT, but it's a false economy.

At first glance, ViewSonic's VX2235wm appears to be a bargain, costing less than £220 for a 22in widescreen. It even has built-in speakers, although these are weedy 2.5W units and likely to render terrifying monster noises laughable. Both DVI and D-SUB inputs are available, rather than the HDMI or D-SUB only of the very cheapest monitors.

However, a glance at the specifications reveals that the VX2235wm lags behinds its competitors, even on paper. Its 5ms response time, 280cd/m2 brightness and 700:1 contrast ratio are all bottom of the pack in this month's selection of 1,680 x 1,050 monitors. Although its bigger sibling, the VX2255wmb, has similar specifications, it also has improved circuitry for better bandwidth and pixel response.

Nevertheless, the VX2235wm didn't fare too badly in DisplayMate, showing a decent level of contrast in both the darkest and brightest ends of the spectrum. We needed to set both the brightness and contrast high, and even then it was a little dull. However, this is par for the course with the traditional anti-glare surface used by the VX2235wm, which will look duller than the anti-reflective system of the Asus, Samsung and Dell.

This shows how synthetic benchmarks can be misleading though. The VX2235wm looked better than most in DisplayMate, but our experiences in real-life usage weren't quite as positive, since it doesn't take into account the effects of motion. Prey was negatively affected by the dullness of the screen and high response time. Although the subtle shades of brown and fast-moving action of our 'Return of the King' sequence were faithfully reproduced, the Blu-ray movie was vaguely hazy and not as sharp as most of the other monitors this month.

The latter failing was in large part due to the VX2235wm's other weakness - its DVI connection isn't HDCP-compliant, so we had to switch to an analogue D-SUB connection to watch 'SWAT'.

The only area in which the VX2235wm's decent contrast results in DisplayMate shone through was photo editing. Whereas anti-reflective screens tend to overly saturate still images, the VX2235wm looked more natural.

However, this is small consolation in what was otherwise a disappointing performance. The VX2235wm's price may be low, but so is its specification. It would be a good choice if you only intend to carry out general office tasks, but for gaming and movies, it's a letdown.

• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008

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