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For a downloadable form of this review: http://www.sirgcal.com/reviews/benq_e2400hd.pdf
(updated 9/11 to include backlight bleeding effects from followup post below)
First off I would like to take a second to thank BenQ and [H]Forum for the chance to be a part of this wonderful offering to test a product and their encouragement to do so fairly and objectively. I think bringing actual users into the testing process is a nice way to get some other real world opinions instead of the raw numbers crunching that many of the review sites do. I hope my review is clear and if there are any questions, please feel free to email/PM me and I will make adjustments to correct any issues... So, Here we go!
BenQ E2400HD
Review by: SirGCal
November 9, 2008
http://www.sirgcal.com/
The Test Computer Specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo Core
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA8KN Pro SLI
RAM: OCZ PC3200 (2 x 1G)
Boot HDD: Western Digital Raptor 74G SATA
CD: BenQ DVD Burn Drive (IDE).
Power Supply: Rosewill RP550S-2MB
Video Card: MSI Radeon HD 4850 R4850-512M 256-bit
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3
Packaging
Packaging was Very Good to Excellent. Good foam support and strong cardboard box. From BenQ, was double-packed also for added benefit. Included in the box were the monitor, a CD, an audio patch cable, and a D-Sub (VGA) cable.
It did not come with a DVI or HDMI cable. Not a huge negative but would add additional cost to the purchase if you plan to run with HDMI or DVI cables. You can find them from retailers like newegg.com for as low as $13.
Setup & Pixel Check
Setup was simple enough; plug it in and reboot. The reboot was critical, as without it, the monitor would throw an invalid sync rate error when trying to go to 1920x1080 even though it did detect it and its capabilities on a hot-plug-in. Following the reboot the computer went to its old default system format (640x480, great googa-mooga) but then properly let the system select the resolutions. So be sure to reboot before this monitor swap.
Pixels are one thing with an LCD purchase that can make many people nervous. I spent a long time looking for bad pixels but every time I think I find one, it wipes right off the screen with my thumb So far, so good
Resolutions
I used the monitor in its native resolution of 1080p mode for these tests (1920x1080). However I did do a quick short test in other resolutions just to see if I noticed anything obvious. Conventional 4:3 (1.33:1) resolutions worked fine (800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x960). Stretched evenly and smoothed out, they actually looked OK, just stretched. 16:9 (1.78:1) looked very good and excellent (1280x720 (720p), 1920x1080 (1080p, native resolution)).
As well as these other resolutions all looked very usable in windows: 1280x768 (1.66:1), 1280x800 (1.6:1), 1280x1024 (1.25:1), 1360x768 (1.77:1) 1360x1024 (little fuzzy 1.328:1), 1440x900 (1.6:1), 1680x1050 (1.6:1)
I did only test the VGA input and I did not test an actual console, DVD player, etc. as of the date of this test however. As a special note; some other sites (see the AnandTechs Review link at the bottom) have reported problems with 720p resolutions using the DVI cable. I did not see any of these using the VGA cable what so ever. They also report no problems with the HDMI input. They also reported problems where 720p left bars on the sides. I did not notice this on my test system. I will hopefully (if I get a chance) hook up an HDMI device in the future and update this part of the review if I do find issues in that area. But right now I see no differences using VGA other than the perfect clarity of the 1080p when using 720p modes. It fills the screen completely and leaves no black areas on the sides for me as others have reported. Perhaps I have a newer firmware version then they reviewed?
Testing Environment & Controls
My home office is an extension off the living room. The floor plan is a 4 bedroom house but this room has had the walls removed to make it a three bedroom house with an open office. At the same time I do keep the house darker than most people. Due to this, I did find that I turned the brightness down to 30. To really get it true to the chart, 0 isnt even dark enough In a bright house (I opened the shades, turned on the lights and even moved into some indirect sunlight) keeping the brightness at the default level should be plenty. The monitor can be plenty bright. It has color and brightness features selectable (and individually adjustable) for Standard, Movie, Dynamics, Photo and sRGB modes. I included some pictures of the results of half (default) and zero brightness.
Its hard to tell from the photos, but in both images in real life in a normally lit room, you can easily see the 1% black box.
The buttons on the right side of the monitor for control and adjustment are easy to push and relatively easy to find. Though they could have a touch more feel to them as the little hump they do offer is small and you have to pay attention to know which button youre on in the dark. If you have light, they are well marked on the front.
The stand has good tilt control but no height adjustment or landscape/portrait rotation. It does have a wire holder loop on the rear bottom to help organize clutter. Other than that, no frills but a functional and stable stand.
Speakers
Yup, it has speakers, how they work however very much depends on your application. Seriously, my aging laptop can blow these away in terms of sound quality. I even pulled all of the tape and plastic packing protective stuff off to see if it was somehow blocking the sound. Nah Its just cheap speakers. They even sound out of phase with each other. No bass what so ever. I am also an audiophile so I am extremely picky with my sound too. I had some cheap speakers sitting around that I plugged into the pass through on the monitor to fix that problem (my good speakers recently died /cry).
However, the pass through the monitor has could be useful as it still allows volume to the passed through speakers to be controlled. And I did not notice any other sound shifting that was obvious using this method either. So, if this is for a very private room or office where you dont need great sound publicly and want easy access and volume control for a set of headphones; then these obviously would work for that application very well.
Color Shifting
Color Shifting is a bit obvious, especially on some test patterns I used. Hey, it is a TN panel. And as those go, especially for the ones I have seen around this size, its really not too bad at all. Id give my right eye for an S-IPS panel in this size and dimension (16:9) with zero input lag but until that happens; I think even I can happily live with this (and I am very picky). If the color shifting does not bother you, then this might be a great choice for you.
Problems & Customer Service
While using this monitor, I ran into the issue where going back to 1920x1080 and 60Hz would cause an Out of Range error at the monitor. 59Hz would work in those cases, if you knew exactly what to click to get there obviously So I shot off an email to BenQ to see if they had any incite on the issue.
With the Out of Range error I got, I sent a few emails and received some phone calls from BenQ and I must say their willingness to go above and beyond to figure out the issue was absolutely excellent! At this time I believe the actual problem was a windows driver issue. I installed the BenQ Plug & Play Monitor driver (supplied on the included CD) and upgraded to the latest (went from 8.8 Catalyst to the 8.10 Catalyst package) drivers and so far have not seen the problem return. And if it did, a reboot so far always has fixed it (again, pointing more toward windows and/or driver issue and not the monitor itself).
Gaming & General Use
Ive been playing some Portal, Team Fortress 2, Oblivion, Fallout, etc. and so far, the color shift is minimal enough to not be an issue or overly noticeable. And I am one of those people who notice all of that stuff and it drives me nuts. (I never used an Aperture Grill monitor because I could not stop staring at those darn wires ) So far Ive been very much enjoying gaming on this monitor. Also working from home, I used only this computer for work during the test period to expose myself to it as much as possible.
Horizontal shifts (also often called buffering) and Vertical Tearing in the image were an issue and v-sync within the game did not solve the problem. However, in the ATI Control Panel, setting wait for vertical refresh all the way to Quality did solve the problem very well. The buffering effect was obviously an issue with the ATI drivers and not the monitor as it also happened with the CRT. With this feature turned on, games looked great and still extremely smooth at 1920x1080 due to the performance of the ATI 4850. Driver updates will also likely gain more performance in the future as they mature.
Using a black and white checker pattern tiled pixel image and moving it around in a window did result is significant flicker effect. I have a movie of this but it is of pretty poor quality (again due to my camera available during this test period) but does show some example of what happens. I may post a better video at a later date to reflect this issue but it is common with LCDs so I am not going to post the video at this time. This should also not effect many, if any real world applications.
Display Latency (Input Lag)
As for input lag, for any real purposes, 0ms-16ms (or less than one frame at 60Hz) To get my basic camera to take quick enough pictures, I had to use the flash so they are a little washed out but you can clearly see the numbers. The CRT is on the left, the new BenQ is behind it on the right propped up on some magazines for more height to improve the picture results. The test results prove that input lag is, at least at 60Hz refresh rate of an LCD, about as low as you can get being nothing to just less than one frame.
About my Pictures
One issue with using a digital camera to take pictures of an LCD for testing is youre actually testing two different systems; the Monitor and the Camera itself. In this case, the camera makes these pictures MUCH worse than they are to the human eye and in some cases adding items or color changes which are not there at all. These are mostly noticeable during the Nokia Test images so I did not post pictures of those tests from the camera with this report as they were showing a false negative effect. Theres still something to be said for a good film camera And I dont have one
Conclusion and Opinions after Two Weeks of Usage
At the $399 retail price, this monitor is awesome. 16:9 for easy connection to consoles or stand alone high-def media players, very good color balance over all with color shift being average to good for TN panels, and effectively no input lag to speak of. All of these together at this price make this monitor really a great find. It performs very well.
Now I finally take my (I swear it is 100 pounds!!!) aging 21 CRT and move it off to the garage sale pile. Finally I have found a panel with at or near zero input lag, colors that are very much tolerable, no noticeable ghosting, and basically, the first flat panel Ive used on my gaming box for more than a week that I didnt take down and put back in the box. I have had some on my work machines for a while now but for my gaming rig, Ive never been happy with them either due to performance or cost or both when compared to my very well working CRT. Now I have and for a very fair price. And I swear my desk just got huge on me
Test Image Websites & Software Names Used for Evaluation:
http://www.gdargaud.net/Hack/DeadPixels.html#LCD
Nokia Monitor Test Program 1.0a and 1.0.0.1 (Used for many tests they offer however no pictures shown due to limited camera quality)
http://tft.vanity.dk/
Other Review Websites:
http://www.anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=3449 (E2200HD Received Editors Choice Award)
(updated 9/11 to include backlight bleeding effects from followup post below)
First off I would like to take a second to thank BenQ and [H]Forum for the chance to be a part of this wonderful offering to test a product and their encouragement to do so fairly and objectively. I think bringing actual users into the testing process is a nice way to get some other real world opinions instead of the raw numbers crunching that many of the review sites do. I hope my review is clear and if there are any questions, please feel free to email/PM me and I will make adjustments to correct any issues... So, Here we go!
BenQ E2400HD
Review by: SirGCal
November 9, 2008
http://www.sirgcal.com/
The Test Computer Specs:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo Core
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA8KN Pro SLI
RAM: OCZ PC3200 (2 x 1G)
Boot HDD: Western Digital Raptor 74G SATA
CD: BenQ DVD Burn Drive (IDE).
Power Supply: Rosewill RP550S-2MB
Video Card: MSI Radeon HD 4850 R4850-512M 256-bit
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3
Packaging
Packaging was Very Good to Excellent. Good foam support and strong cardboard box. From BenQ, was double-packed also for added benefit. Included in the box were the monitor, a CD, an audio patch cable, and a D-Sub (VGA) cable.
It did not come with a DVI or HDMI cable. Not a huge negative but would add additional cost to the purchase if you plan to run with HDMI or DVI cables. You can find them from retailers like newegg.com for as low as $13.
Setup & Pixel Check
Setup was simple enough; plug it in and reboot. The reboot was critical, as without it, the monitor would throw an invalid sync rate error when trying to go to 1920x1080 even though it did detect it and its capabilities on a hot-plug-in. Following the reboot the computer went to its old default system format (640x480, great googa-mooga) but then properly let the system select the resolutions. So be sure to reboot before this monitor swap.
Pixels are one thing with an LCD purchase that can make many people nervous. I spent a long time looking for bad pixels but every time I think I find one, it wipes right off the screen with my thumb So far, so good
Resolutions
I used the monitor in its native resolution of 1080p mode for these tests (1920x1080). However I did do a quick short test in other resolutions just to see if I noticed anything obvious. Conventional 4:3 (1.33:1) resolutions worked fine (800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x960). Stretched evenly and smoothed out, they actually looked OK, just stretched. 16:9 (1.78:1) looked very good and excellent (1280x720 (720p), 1920x1080 (1080p, native resolution)).
As well as these other resolutions all looked very usable in windows: 1280x768 (1.66:1), 1280x800 (1.6:1), 1280x1024 (1.25:1), 1360x768 (1.77:1) 1360x1024 (little fuzzy 1.328:1), 1440x900 (1.6:1), 1680x1050 (1.6:1)
I did only test the VGA input and I did not test an actual console, DVD player, etc. as of the date of this test however. As a special note; some other sites (see the AnandTechs Review link at the bottom) have reported problems with 720p resolutions using the DVI cable. I did not see any of these using the VGA cable what so ever. They also report no problems with the HDMI input. They also reported problems where 720p left bars on the sides. I did not notice this on my test system. I will hopefully (if I get a chance) hook up an HDMI device in the future and update this part of the review if I do find issues in that area. But right now I see no differences using VGA other than the perfect clarity of the 1080p when using 720p modes. It fills the screen completely and leaves no black areas on the sides for me as others have reported. Perhaps I have a newer firmware version then they reviewed?
Testing Environment & Controls
My home office is an extension off the living room. The floor plan is a 4 bedroom house but this room has had the walls removed to make it a three bedroom house with an open office. At the same time I do keep the house darker than most people. Due to this, I did find that I turned the brightness down to 30. To really get it true to the chart, 0 isnt even dark enough In a bright house (I opened the shades, turned on the lights and even moved into some indirect sunlight) keeping the brightness at the default level should be plenty. The monitor can be plenty bright. It has color and brightness features selectable (and individually adjustable) for Standard, Movie, Dynamics, Photo and sRGB modes. I included some pictures of the results of half (default) and zero brightness.
Its hard to tell from the photos, but in both images in real life in a normally lit room, you can easily see the 1% black box.
The buttons on the right side of the monitor for control and adjustment are easy to push and relatively easy to find. Though they could have a touch more feel to them as the little hump they do offer is small and you have to pay attention to know which button youre on in the dark. If you have light, they are well marked on the front.
The stand has good tilt control but no height adjustment or landscape/portrait rotation. It does have a wire holder loop on the rear bottom to help organize clutter. Other than that, no frills but a functional and stable stand.
Speakers
Yup, it has speakers, how they work however very much depends on your application. Seriously, my aging laptop can blow these away in terms of sound quality. I even pulled all of the tape and plastic packing protective stuff off to see if it was somehow blocking the sound. Nah Its just cheap speakers. They even sound out of phase with each other. No bass what so ever. I am also an audiophile so I am extremely picky with my sound too. I had some cheap speakers sitting around that I plugged into the pass through on the monitor to fix that problem (my good speakers recently died /cry).
However, the pass through the monitor has could be useful as it still allows volume to the passed through speakers to be controlled. And I did not notice any other sound shifting that was obvious using this method either. So, if this is for a very private room or office where you dont need great sound publicly and want easy access and volume control for a set of headphones; then these obviously would work for that application very well.
Color Shifting
Color Shifting is a bit obvious, especially on some test patterns I used. Hey, it is a TN panel. And as those go, especially for the ones I have seen around this size, its really not too bad at all. Id give my right eye for an S-IPS panel in this size and dimension (16:9) with zero input lag but until that happens; I think even I can happily live with this (and I am very picky). If the color shifting does not bother you, then this might be a great choice for you.
Problems & Customer Service
While using this monitor, I ran into the issue where going back to 1920x1080 and 60Hz would cause an Out of Range error at the monitor. 59Hz would work in those cases, if you knew exactly what to click to get there obviously So I shot off an email to BenQ to see if they had any incite on the issue.
With the Out of Range error I got, I sent a few emails and received some phone calls from BenQ and I must say their willingness to go above and beyond to figure out the issue was absolutely excellent! At this time I believe the actual problem was a windows driver issue. I installed the BenQ Plug & Play Monitor driver (supplied on the included CD) and upgraded to the latest (went from 8.8 Catalyst to the 8.10 Catalyst package) drivers and so far have not seen the problem return. And if it did, a reboot so far always has fixed it (again, pointing more toward windows and/or driver issue and not the monitor itself).
Gaming & General Use
Ive been playing some Portal, Team Fortress 2, Oblivion, Fallout, etc. and so far, the color shift is minimal enough to not be an issue or overly noticeable. And I am one of those people who notice all of that stuff and it drives me nuts. (I never used an Aperture Grill monitor because I could not stop staring at those darn wires ) So far Ive been very much enjoying gaming on this monitor. Also working from home, I used only this computer for work during the test period to expose myself to it as much as possible.
Horizontal shifts (also often called buffering) and Vertical Tearing in the image were an issue and v-sync within the game did not solve the problem. However, in the ATI Control Panel, setting wait for vertical refresh all the way to Quality did solve the problem very well. The buffering effect was obviously an issue with the ATI drivers and not the monitor as it also happened with the CRT. With this feature turned on, games looked great and still extremely smooth at 1920x1080 due to the performance of the ATI 4850. Driver updates will also likely gain more performance in the future as they mature.
Using a black and white checker pattern tiled pixel image and moving it around in a window did result is significant flicker effect. I have a movie of this but it is of pretty poor quality (again due to my camera available during this test period) but does show some example of what happens. I may post a better video at a later date to reflect this issue but it is common with LCDs so I am not going to post the video at this time. This should also not effect many, if any real world applications.
Display Latency (Input Lag)
As for input lag, for any real purposes, 0ms-16ms (or less than one frame at 60Hz) To get my basic camera to take quick enough pictures, I had to use the flash so they are a little washed out but you can clearly see the numbers. The CRT is on the left, the new BenQ is behind it on the right propped up on some magazines for more height to improve the picture results. The test results prove that input lag is, at least at 60Hz refresh rate of an LCD, about as low as you can get being nothing to just less than one frame.
About my Pictures
One issue with using a digital camera to take pictures of an LCD for testing is youre actually testing two different systems; the Monitor and the Camera itself. In this case, the camera makes these pictures MUCH worse than they are to the human eye and in some cases adding items or color changes which are not there at all. These are mostly noticeable during the Nokia Test images so I did not post pictures of those tests from the camera with this report as they were showing a false negative effect. Theres still something to be said for a good film camera And I dont have one
Conclusion and Opinions after Two Weeks of Usage
At the $399 retail price, this monitor is awesome. 16:9 for easy connection to consoles or stand alone high-def media players, very good color balance over all with color shift being average to good for TN panels, and effectively no input lag to speak of. All of these together at this price make this monitor really a great find. It performs very well.
Now I finally take my (I swear it is 100 pounds!!!) aging 21 CRT and move it off to the garage sale pile. Finally I have found a panel with at or near zero input lag, colors that are very much tolerable, no noticeable ghosting, and basically, the first flat panel Ive used on my gaming box for more than a week that I didnt take down and put back in the box. I have had some on my work machines for a while now but for my gaming rig, Ive never been happy with them either due to performance or cost or both when compared to my very well working CRT. Now I have and for a very fair price. And I swear my desk just got huge on me
Test Image Websites & Software Names Used for Evaluation:
http://www.gdargaud.net/Hack/DeadPixels.html#LCD
Nokia Monitor Test Program 1.0a and 1.0.0.1 (Used for many tests they offer however no pictures shown due to limited camera quality)
http://tft.vanity.dk/
Other Review Websites:
http://www.anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=3449 (E2200HD Received Editors Choice Award)
