On the face of it, liyama’s ProLite E2409HDS looks good value. It’s a Full HD 23.5in panel with a standard TN panel, but costs only £117.
There are no fancy features, but you do get D-SUB, DVI and HDMI inputs as well as two 3.5mm jacks for powering the pair of built-in speakers or passing audio to headphones.
Straight out of the box, the liyama delivers a stunningly bright Windows desktop, with a brightness level of 295cd/m’ and a contrast ratio of 895:1. That might make for an eye-popping first impression, but its image quality is far from perfect.
The first disappointment is the backlighting: a halo of backlight bleed seeps up the panel from the bottom, with a smaller area of leakage at the top. Brightness is uneven, with the panel looking dim along the left-hand side. Our selection of test photographs didn’t look quite right, either: highlights were overblown, while colors looked over-saturated and unnatural.
Changing the colour temperature to Warm and upping the gamma to Mode 2 improved performance no end. The poor average Delta E of 7.2 dropped to 4.0, while the maximum Delta E dropped from 16.9 to 8.7 – a massive improvement. Colors looked natural again and the wayward default gamma of 1.6 now measured just a smidgen off the ideal of 2.2.
The poor default settings and backlight bleed give away the liyama’s budget build but, in its favor, it isn’t hard to eke out reasonable images out from the E2409HDS. A bigger problem is the competition, and those on a tight budget would be advised to spend a few pounds more on the Hanns.G HL231.
