Home page » Monitors

Search:

Refine search for Monitors

Aside from the lack of front facing buttons there's also a pleasing lack of other distractions on the front of the display, just a power LED, which can be turned off in the OSD, the Chimei logo at the bottom, model number at the top left and a couple of stickers which can be easily removed. There's also a modicum of adjustability in the stand thanks to a dual hinge design, allowing you to adjust height and tilt independently.

You can also rotate the display thanks to a rotating plate underneath the base, while the large surface area of the base ensures that the monitor remains very stable at all times. This combined with the simple but pleasant aesthetic make the CMV 222H a surprisingly well put together and good looking screen that should suffice for most requirements. VESA wall mounting is also supported, so you can wall mount the display or even use a monitor arm should that be your wish.

For tweaking the settings, the OSD can be accessed by holding down the input switch button on the outside edge. Once again the CMV 222H surprises in both the design and options available to you, with a nicely styled OSD that's chock full of options. Default colour options include 6500K, 7500K, 9300K, sRGB, with the option for user defined controls. Naturally, you can adjust Brightness and Contrast to your heart's content, while you can also adjust Sharpness, Colour (saturation), Hue and Backlight level, in addition to all of the other options normally available.

As already mentioned, there's an HDMI port present, and it ought to go without saying that it's HDCP enabled, so you can plug in your HD DVD and Blu-ray players - though as we'll detail later, you probably wouldn't want to do this. Indeed, to repeat a mini-rant from the Iiyama ProLite B2403WS review, one has to question the real value of having HDMI over DVI in displays such as this. It may make for good marketing literature, but its practical use is arguable. Moreover, to add insult to perceived injury there's no DVI-to-HDMI cable in the box, so out of the box you're limited to D-SUB.

The 16.2 million colours that the CMV 222H produces (using dithering remember) is well below the 16.7 million (real) colours of a 24-bit Truecolour panel, so this isn't a screen you'd want to use for serious image editing. Other than this, Chimei/Mirai claims a typical grey-to-grey response time of 5ms, contrast ratio of 1,200:1 and a brightness rating of 330cd/m2. All of which is fairly reasonable, though as ever we're inclined to take any literal claims about monitor performance with not just a pinch of salt, but a large pile of it.

For example, by default a "dynamic" contrast mode is enabled and from using the display it occurs to us that the quoted 1,200:1 contrast ratio could well be derived from this mode being enabled because black levels are by no means astonishing, quite the opposite in fact. Also, as is the case with many of these dynamic modes, it destroys detail at the darker end of the colour scale and washes out colours too. In short, it's not very good.

Add your comment

© 2003-2009 TrustedReviews & IPC Media
About Us | Contact Us | Legal | Privacy | RSS