Verdict: Incredibly cheap, yet quite cheerful.

A 24in TFT for scarcely more than £300? Surely there's some mistake? Well, there's one very obvious gotcha: instead of DVI, this monitor is equipped with HDMI. Fortunately, Iiyama has supplied a HDMI to DVI cable in the box, so you can hook up your PC digitally immediately. Alternatively, you can use analogue D-SUB.

Unlike most of the 1,920 x 1,200 monitors in this month's Labs test, the B2403WS has integrated speakers, although they're nothing worth writing home about.

The B2403WS has cut a few corners in other areas to keep its price low. Like the other 24in TFT this month costing less than £400, Samsung's SyncMaster 245B, the B2403WS also uses a 6-bit TN panel instead of 8-bit PVA or IPS. This cheaper technology has quality implications; for a start, this is another TFT on which the viewing angle makes a noticeable difference to contrast at the low end of the scale. And, like many screens, contrast was better as greys tended towards white, rather than towards black, showing weak black levels.

This was particularly obvious when we turned our attention to our moving image tests. Our Blu-ray movie showed good colour, but had the slightly washed-out look we've seen on a lot of TFTs this month - a clear result of poor black levels. A similar fault was visible on our DVD test. The Battle of Pelennor Fields is already a fairly hazy sequence, and the weak contrast in dark regions merely reduced the dynamic range still further. Iiyama's Dynamic Contrast mode didn't help much either.

The B2403WS's performance in Prey was better than we had expected, with a fair amount of detail still visible in shady areas and vibrant textures. We also found the quoted response of 2ms to be quite believable, as this display was as smooth as the best models. Need for Speed: Carbon felt very fluid, and the neon lighting was bright and lively.

Overall, this isn't a bad showing for such an unfeasibly cheap 24in TFT. The image quality exhibited a few flaws, but it's nowhere near bad enough to render the low price a false economy. If you thought that you couldn't afford a 24in 1,920 x 1,200 monitor then think again - Iiyama's B2403WS has dropped the price to a new level, substantially undercutting its competitors.

• 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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