Best 24" monitor for sub £400

mentat

mentat

mentat

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Hi guys I'd like to buy a 24" monitor today to hopefully have with me tomorrow (Saturday delivery).

I am a Software Developer by trade so will spend most of my time coding but also would like to watch movies and play games on it.

At the moment I have the Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP 24" http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-024-DE sitting in my OcUK shopping basket but is it worth the £400 or I can get something almost as good for much better? I have also seen talk on the forums that this monitor has problems with input lag...?

Any help much appreciated. Also what's my cut off time to order for Sat delivery? thanks.
 
Gaming will be the most problematic of the three things you want to do with it as the input lag (how far behind what's actually going on the monitor is) is >60ms on average. This makes twitch games (racing games, FPS's etc) a little bit trickier to play. It's not unplayable for an occasional gamer by any means, but I did get my behind handed to me a little more than usual playing online!

One thing to bear in mind, you'll probably need to buy (or borrow) a colour calibration unit (colorimeter) as it's a high-gamut screen, meaning out of the box it's way oversaturated for normal web/pc use.

See if you can get a couple of 2407's instead as they are meant to be better in both regards (not being wide gamut, except the -HC version).

You could also try the Hyundai W240D-PVA which is less than the 2408, and uses the same Samsung panel as the 2407 (plus it's also used in the Eizo).
 
Thanks guys for the advice. Damn this is a hard decision to choose a new monitor! I think the 2408WFP is out as I'd like to play games on it. I do like the option to have lots of input connections this monitor provides though if for instance I want to plug an xbox into it. OcUK doesn't seem to have the 2407 available. The Hyundai W240D-PVA 24 specs look good but the last few review comments are putting me off.... arh this is a hard decision.
 
yeah the on screen display you are right you don't spend much time with that so no biggie. Also it's a "High gloss Design & Soft touch key" does that mean it's a glossy screen won't that get marked easily and have glare if light is coming through from my blinds behind? never had a glossy screen before so no idea what they are like. Do you have the Hyundai W240D-PVA by chance? Also if I order now would OCuK have it to me by tomorrow? in central London. Thanks
 
I think by glossy design they mean it's got a glossy bezel, not the screen itself, glossy screens tend to be relegated to TN panels as it helps increase their saturation slightly.
 
Cool what's the main difference between the Hyundai W240D-TN 24 and Hyundai W240D-PVA I don't know much about the diffence between TN vs PVA technology. As far as I can see the difference is response time and viewing angle and price. Thanks
 
It's the panel techology used. TN is regarded as the worse of the two under most metrics, apart from response time. PVA has better viewing angles, is 8bit per pixel (whereas TN is 6, so can only "really" display 255,000 colours - they fudge it though and say 16.2 through dithering).

PVA does have some drawbacks, black crush (very, very dark colours all appearing black when viewing head on) and gamma shift, but is still better than TN in that respect.

At 24" you'll notice the viewing angle problems with TN more than with an older, smaller monitor.

I'd go with the PVA model as it's definitely a better panel for what you want to be doing with it.
 
I would advise you to not buy the W240D since Hyundai has the worst customer service I have ever seen, my W240D was faulty and turning to the white after displaying pictures which had too much white.

They refused to acknowledge that there was an error and when it finally broke totally, they took 1month and half before to send it back. The one they sent back had the same problem again (turning to white) within 1 month.

I couldn't be bothered sending it again but it finally broke before Christmas. It took them two more months to send the monitor back, they refused to give me any ETA and didn't want to go in the details for their SLA (actually the guy told me that they have any SLA). This happened after calling them almost every day for weeks getting more and more elusive answers from quite rude persons.

Finally I got my monitor back around February and it just broke again. I should have known ... the monitor they sent me has a tag on the side saying that it has been sent to PC Magazin (the german one I guess) in 2007.

Not only it took them 2 months but I got a test model which was built 2 years ago.
 
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