Verdict: A good TFT at a good price, and the HDMI input is a bonus.
While you can buy cheaper 22in TFTs than this BenQ - the cheapest we've seen is the perfectly respectable £180 Hanns.G HW223DP - premium 22in TFTs cost around £220. Hopefully then, a screen pitched between 'budget-tastic' and 'pay-through-the-nose' should be friendly to both the eye and the wallet.
BenQ has been able to drive down the price thanks to the decreasing cost of the TN panel technology it uses. However, TN panels can typically accept only six bits of data per colour channel even though graphics cards output eight bits per colour channel (or ten bits if you have a modern Radeon card). A six-bit panel can only understand and display 262 thousand colours, which would look rubbish, so it takes these colours and dithers up to 16 million, or more usually 16.2 million, displayed colours, which looks much better. However, BenQ doesn't use a conventional TN panel with standard FRC (Frame Rate Control) dithering; instead it uses a panel (the make and manufacturer is unspecified) with hi-FRC technology to dither 16.7 million colours. However clever hi-FRC is, though, it's still dithering and therefore guessing rather than knowing, which colours should be displayed. This, plus the fact that the backlight is conventional rather than LED-based, means that we wouldn't expect top-notch image quality suitable for professional image editing.
The BenQ's overall specifications are fairly mundane for a 22in panel. As expected, the native resolution is 1,680 x 1,050, which is great for widescreen gaming, but only sufficient for 720 HD, not the full 1080 HD. Contrast is quoted at 700:1, which is average for modern TFTs (screens quoting massive contrast ranges of 2000:1 or even 5000:1 use 'dynamic contrast' methods, effectively cheating by shifting the black level, or even dimming or brightening the backlight, to better suit the lighting of the image being displayed). The brightness level of 300cd/m2 is average. Some panels now offer 350cd/m2, but others are less bright than this screen. Finally, the BenQ's response time is 5ms - hardly slow, but there are 22in screens that boast a response time of 2ms.
Surprisingly, the BenQ sports HDMI, so you can hook up your Blu-ray drive, HD-DVD player or PlayStation 3. BenQ claimed to be the first manufacturer to offer HDMI in a PC-oriented TFT - namely, the FP241W - but there are now quite a few alternatives, with Iiyama and Hanns.G among the imitators. At £150, Hanns.G's HG216DP is the cheapest HDMI monitor we've seen, but it offers only D-SUB as the alternative input, necessitating an adaptor for DVI. The BenQ adds a DVI input to the D-SUB and HDMI, so you could hook it up to your PC and PS3 at the same time.
The control buttons are hidden on the side of bezel, which gives the screen a clean appearance, but makes playing with the OSD a little fiddly. Thankfully, brightness and contrast are accessible directly from those side-mounted buttons, alongside the presets of Dynamics, Photo, Standard and Movie. The full menu is only required for invoking colour temperature and geometry adjustments.
We put the BenQ through our usual suite of monitor tests, using DisplayMate to assess any deficiencies in setup, before moving to game tests, and DVD and Blu-ray movies. The DisplayMate tests revealed a lack of wide viewing angles, particularly vertically, which is a habitual problem with TN TFTs. We also found that the BenQ missed the definition between dark greys and black. An odd green tinge to the darker greys added to our disappointment regarding the poor contrast at the lower end of the luminance scale. The BenQ was similarly unable to discern very light greys from white. The BenQ doesn't have a particularly astounding dynamic range, despite the claims of 700:1 contrast - it could resolve just 6 per cent colour saturation against a pure white background. A small amount of backlight bleed was visible around the edges too.
The low dynamic range was particularly obvious in our Blu-ray movie test, which looked rather washed out. The DVD movie also appeared a little hazy and lacking in detail. The BenQ acquitted itself better with games, however. Colours were sufficiently vibrant in our test laps in Need for Speed: Carbon, and the darker areas of Prey were just about visible.
For gaming, the BenQ was on a par with Iiyama's 22in £220 ProLite E2201W-B, although the latter was noticeably better with movies and in the DisplayMate tests.
Conclusion
While the BenQ isn't a great screen, it's serviceable and fine for games. It costs £20 less than the slightly superior Iiyama ProLite E2201W-B. The HDMI input is handy for future proofing, just in case the graphics industry decides to drop DVI and D-SUB. Ultimately, the BenQ is a good value screen if you have to stick to a £200 budget. If not, the ProLite E2201W-B is worth the extra £20 and remains our top choice out of all the 22in TFTs we've seen.
