Take a glance through its specs and this monitor looks a bargain. Not only does it offer 24in of screen space and Full HD resolution, it also eschews the cheaper TN panels for a high-quality A-MVA panel.
The smart, unfussy design doesn’t stretch to luxuries such as an adjustable stand, but DVI, D-SUB and twin HDMI ports are present, while a four-port USB hub provides two sockets at the rear and two more at the side. There’s even a handy 3.5mm headphone output.
Image quality, however, is mediocre. Poor colour reproduction left our test images looking unnatural, with skin tones and subtle colors rendered incorrectly. An average Delta E of 10.6 wins the BenQ the dubious accolade of being the least accurate monitor on test.
BenQ’s preset image modes do little to help matters, with most of them adding a horrible, over-sharpened effect that ruins fine detail and text. We also observed horrendous smearing on moving images. We fixed this by switching on the panel’s overdrive feature, a setting that should be enabled by default.
It’s a shame, as the panel itself is capable. The typical VA panel strengths are in evidence: deep, lustrous blacks combine with measured contrast ratios of well over 2,500:1. And tweaking the EW2420′s settings yielded much better results. After adjusting the monitor’s RGB controls we managed to get the Delta E down to 2.9, but only thanks to our colorimeter.
Had BenQ paid more attention to providing well-calibrated presets, the EW2420 could have been an unqualified bargain. Instead, it’s a big disappointment.
