LG Flatron W2242S: Budget 22-inch monitor
Calling all cheapskates! LG has just started making a 22-inch monitor that you can pick up for pennies. 16,000 pennies to be exact
Our chums at LG recently telephoned to say they had a new 22-inch monitor we should look at. We laughed and told them to go away -- Crave doesn't get out of bed for anything less than 24 inches. It wasn't long before we gave in, though -- the Flatron W2242S costs a paltry £160.
It's not much to look at. It ships in a super-skinny, super-light box so it's easy to buy one on the high street then take it home on a bus. The monitor itself isn't hyper-sexy, though -- it's sort of... monitor-shaped, has a reasonably thin silver bezel, and a blue LED that's so bright you might want to cover it with masking tape if you use it at night.
The specs aren't much to write home about either. The native resolution is 1,680x1,050 pixels, it has a has a 5ms response time, an 8,000:1 contrast ratio, and 300cd/m2 brightness. Sadly it only has an analogue D-Sub input, there's no built-in USB port, no speakers, no height adjustment, and no pivoting.
Image quality is pretty meh, too. We had to spend quite a bit of time tweaking the settings to get it from crap to average -- with the main issue being the fact the colours were so washed out. Now we've sorted that out, we're generally happy with it. If you're after a budget screen for low-rent office drudgery, you could do a lot worse. -Rory Reid