Verdict: The winner on quality, but lacking in other areas

Let's admit it - if Sony's SDM-HS95P is the TFT we all want to take home, then the SDM-S204E is its larger, rather less attractive sister. With its matt grey finish, this 20in panel would look very much at home on a 3D workstation or handling vast forecast spreadsheets in a city office. Still, you can feel its class just by making a basic height adjustment; it practically glides through the 10cm of travel.

The controls are similar to those of the SDM-HS95P, though the vertical positioning of the buttons makes navigating the menus slightly more intuitive. Of course, the SDM-S204E is far too sensible to have the movie and game modes of its smaller sibling. Instead, you get a range of ECO modes - high, middle, low and user - which basically affect the strength of the backlight and the contrast levels.

In middle or user mode (with the backlight turned up), this is a fantastically bright monitor - in fact, it's a bit too bright. Ramped back a little, it's a very accomplished display. Its handling of near-black tones is astonishing, and it picked out even the darkest grey tones from black in our grey-level saturation tests, then delivered a huge range of tones in the banding-free colour and greyscale intensity tests. It's weaker with near-white, low-saturation colours, but the SDM-S204E still delivered the best technical score in the whole Labs test.

In real-world use, it's just as impressive. Thanks to the excellent colour handling and the superb contrast, Doom 3 looked amazing. It was razor-sharp and full of impact at the native 1,600 x 1,200 resolution, and totally free of blur with the frame rates pushed up by throttling down the resolution. Photo reproduction is great, with crystal-clear background textures and lovely, natural colours. Only DVD playback is disappointing. Colours were strong but it never quite matches the precision of the ViewSonic.The Sony is the better tool for a professional designer, but the ViewSonic is a better all-rounder.

• Cases - 21st November 2008
• Motherboards - 24th October 2008
• Gaming Headsets - 26th September 2008
• Dream PCs - 24th September 2008
• Headphones - 12th September 2008
• Media PC components - 22nd August 2008
• PSUs - 14th July 2008

• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - Hard disks / storage
• Asus EAH4870 TOP - Graphics cards
• Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro - Sound cards
• Multiwinia - Games
• Zotac GeForce GTX 260² - Graphics cards
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 - Graphics cards
• Scan 3XS X58 Core i7 - Desktop PCs