Hyundai W240D-PVA

Verdict:

[+] Bargain

Good PVA panel; every useful video input; fully adjustale stand

[-] Cheap

Ghosting; blurry text

While you can count the number of manufacturers currently knocking out 24in widescreen TFT panels on the fingers of one hand, a cursory perusal of your favourite online retailer will reveal a veritable army of companies selling monitors that use these panels -something doesn't quite add up.

Shrewd buyers could therefore bag a high-quality panel from a budget-price monitor manufacturer. After all, if that bargain basement £330 24in monitor from a brand you've never heard of is based on a high-quality panel from one of the big players in LCD panel production, what's the downside?

A 24in PANEL BY ANY OTHER NAME?

It's this kind of thinking that makes Hyundai's latest 24in monitor appear so attractive on paper. Despite retailing at around £330, the W240D-PVA (but not the W240D-TN - this has an entirely different panel inside it) sports a premium PVA LCD panel.

In theory, this screen could be a match for Samsung's 24in SyncMaster 245T, which costs over £600.

DESIGN

In purely aesthetic terms, this Hyundai has its more costly Korean competitor licked for looks. Its glossy plastic bezel is a little funkier than the Samsung's prim and rather anonymous housing.

The chassis is also a match in terms of adjustability - tilt, rotate, swivel and height adjustment are all possible.

INPUTS

The Hyundai similarly has plenty of inputs: DVI with HDCP and HDMI cater for PCs and consoles, and there's D-SUB, component, composite and S-Video for other sources. There's no USB hub or media card slots, but the range of video inputs is surprisingly comprehensive for such a keenly priced PVA screen.

SPECIFICATIONS

The Hyundai matches pretty much every other 24in screen on the market for specs - the usual 1,920 x 1,200 native resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio are givens but elsewhere, there's nothing to raise concern.

The wide 178-degree horizontal and vertical viewing angles, 2ms grey-to-grey response time, 500cd/m2 brightness and the 1,000: static (3,000:1 dynamic) contrast ratio are all indicative of a high-quality PVA panel.

IMAGE QUALITY

Fire up the Hyundai for the first time and the suspicion that it's pointless paying more for a big-brand monitor grows even stronger. Like any good PVA panel, the Hyundai is punchy, vibrant and boasts vivid, saturated colours.

In fact, we prefer this monitor's default colour balance to that of some of the pricier alternatives around. While many other screens have excessive colour saturation that flirts with gaudiness, the Hyundai is more natural, composed and controlled. Whites are clean, bright and even, and the stability of black tones when viewed off-centre is very impressive.

The wide quoted viewing angles bear up to close inspection - we saw barely any colour inversion at all.

The Hyundai performs well in the colour handling tests, accurately reproducing all the shades of green, red and blue as well as fine changes in chrominance.

THE DOWNSIDE

At this stage, you might be worrying that reality is about to make an unwelcome appearance in this review and place a damper on proceedings. Surely a screen that sounds this good for such a low price has some flaws? You're right to be sceptical, and unfortunately, the flaws are rather serious.

The poor performance in the pixel response is the main harbinger of doom. Not to put too fine a point on it, there's something slightly rotten about this monitor's image processing electronics.

On the Windows desktop, a spot of window jostling and cursor cavorting in Vista confirmed our worst fears - the screen suffers from an acute case of ghosting. When an object moves on this screen, a trail appears in its wake, typically in more or less a contrasting colour to the object that's moving.

This is a problem with the panel's overdrive technology, which overvolts the pixels for milliseconds in order to make them switch colour faster - clearly the technology isn't up to scratch in the Hyundai. Whether you're moving windows in Windows, watching films or gaming, moving objects blur nastily.

There's a further fault with the electronics of the Hyundai: a softening effect has been added to the screen's basic image processing. As a result, even static images, especially fonts and icons, aren't as sharp as they should be.

CONCLUSION

With so much promise and potential on offer, it's impossible not to feel a little deflated about this monitor. It offers all the video inputs you could hope for, a superb panel and commands a low price. However, the dodgy pixel-response time electronics and odd softening effect in the basic image-processing electronics are significant flaws.

Our basic premise that it's possible to acquire a high-quality panel incorporated in a low-cost screen still stands, to an extent; both serious faults with the W240D-PVA are due to electronics that Hyundai has added to the screen, rather than imperfections of the Samsung panel. The fact that it would take relatively mild tuning in Hyundai's labs to fix these issues is only more infuriating. Here's hoping Hyundai does just that and offers a revised model that delivers.

You can buy the Hyundai W240D-PVA from Scan Computers for £327.71 inc VAT (price correct at time of writing)

For more information on the W240D-PVA, visit Hyundai's website

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