Asus VE247H / VE248H / VE278H

Slow, sluggish, dont bother – I am really upset right now. I just bought this heap of rubbish and discovered my 6yo monitor is better than this rubbish. Its slow, laggy, a lot of pixilation. gaming is useless on it because of how laggy it is. How can they put something as bad as this on the shelf to be sold is beyond me. Feel like taking a hammer to the thing

Perfect screen – Great picture quality. Vibrant picture. Got 2x of these running side by side and they have made a difference to my viewing since upgrading from a 19" screen. VGA, DVI, and HDMI means I have a choice of connections to use. This screen even has speaker inputs. 3 Year warranty is included for my peace of mind. Highly recommended screen. Great picure quality at an affordable price

A Good All-Round Budget Display – I have a 13" Macbook Pro (2010, 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB 1066Mhz RAM, NVidia GeForce 320M 256MB) but felt that the small 1280x800 display just wasn't enough. It could really only fit one page of a document on it at once, or when editing video in Final Cut Pro (a hobby) the interface was cramped. Also, there are many times when you simply need to be looking at two documents or pages at once on the screen, but unfortunately a 13" screen at that resolution just won't cut it.

So, I set off on my search for a monitor. My budget was about $250 but I was looking to go sub-$200. I was initially pulled towards Samsung for their high quality displays, but the price tends to match. Indeed, I looked around at different reviews and displays and found an LG display which looked quite nice, as did a Dell, but then I spotted one of Asus' monitors on a list of supposed good ones and looked into it. It had nice specs but was still out of my price range, and yet Asus had the answer: the VE247H. It's got the specs of a higher priced monitor but a cost usually associated with something worse (which it isn't). It would appear to be a near-perfect balance of cost and performance.

I bought it over the internet for A$180, which as far as I'm concerned was a good price. For that, the display has reasonably full wallet of draw cards:

1920x1080 300-nit Twisted-Nematic LED LCD display

2ms response

DVI, VGA, HDMI in with DVI and VGA cables supplied

Audio In/Out and Stereo Speakers

The display itself is good quality and looks very nice. There's an excellent range of supplied cables and while HDMI would be a nice addition to the box, I don't believe any display in this price range comes with one anyway. The brightness is exemplary for the price (this monitor has a 300-nit display whereas many monitors in this price range sport ~250-nit backlights). It is definitely responsive and there is little if any ghosting. An extra good thing is the fact that the on/standby light sits under the bezel and essentially out of view, reducing all distraction (nothing worse than a glaring green light on your monitor). It's light blue/dim orange too so don't worry about using the monitor in the dark.

I only have one major gripe and that is this: it is a Twisted Nematic (TN) display. It's a good one, but the fact is that In Plane Switching (IPS) is a better technology and if you can afford it or can justify the extra cost, I recommend it. IPS allows for better viewing angles whilst maintaining colours, so there is no washing out/colour inversion or any of that stuff which tends to occur when viewing a TN display from sub-optimal angles. That said, when looking at the display front-on (as you tend to do), there is basically no noticeable difference between IPS and TN displays, so it comes down to how you use the monitor; if it's just for personal use, TN is fine, but if it's for collaborative work or will be used when people may be viewing it from different angles, IPS is the way to go (hence its use in televisions, etc.). Again, you have to justify the price and whether or not you need it, and TN displays have improved a lot of the years too. There is also a slight problem with the colour reproduction on the display. When it arrived it was very yellow, but I solved this easily by mucking around in the display's in-built menu (which contrary to popular belief, really isn't bad at all) and ended with the colour settings at red (60), green (65) and blue (100). Personal choice will yield different results for different people and I'm not sure if the yellowness was just my display or not, as I haven't read about it being an issue in other reviews. Either way, it's easily fixable. Also, the inbuilt speakers are quite horrible, but considering that I don't know anyone who actually uses inbuilt monitor speakers, that's really a non-issue like the colouration. Finally, it also came with one dark pixel (the warranty policy states that you need 5 dark pixels to warrant replacement, which is pretty standard, and the pixel does not affect use in any way. In fact, getting a flawless display at this price and size would be a very rare thing).

I know it sounds like a gave the display a bit of a bashing, but I'm very happy with it and it offers far more space for work and the like. I can now fit three word documents on screen at once, or look at multiple pages/windows simultaneously (the physical size of the display doesn't matter so much as the resolution, of course). Video editing on Final Cut Pro is also much improved with the extra space (and I sometimes put the events window on my Macbook too, although driving all those pixels doesn't help Final Cut's GPU acceleration much seeing as the 320M is already loaded up at this point). Overall, it's a real asset to my desk and I'm very happy I made the purchase. My Mac, despite its somewhat humble specifications, can generally drive all those pixels without too much heat or strain, and if you are considering a budget monitor, I would recommend you look into this one.

This is where I bought it at a very competitive price: ebay

[link removed] 1080p display, 300-nit brightness, HDMI input, good range of supplied cabling, 2ms response, nice aesthetics, on/standby light is UNDER bezel Bad speakers, Twisted Nematic display, very yellow (but fixable) colouration