Eizo FlexScan S2231W

The picture quality from this 20.1in screen is sublime and the primary reason for that is its wide colour gamut, which is said to encompass up to 92 per cent of the Adobe RGB colour space. What this means is that it's not your everyday monitor, but is instead aimed at photographers and anyone else who works with digital images that will be published.

It's a widescreen monitor with a native resolution of 1680x1050 on its 20.1in viewable area. But the main selling point is its colour gamut, which certainly seemed to make a huge difference when the FlexScan was compared against mainstream monitors placed next to it. The FlexScan showed much more vibrancy, especially in green and purple colours, but not only that, its luminance was superb.

We couldn't see any backlight seepage and its black and white levels were rendered perfectly during our tests. The darkest grey colour levels were viewable on a black background, but we did have to play with the contrast slightly in order to get the lightest light-grey colour to show up on a white background. Shades of grey were spot on, and indeed, all primary and secondary colours looked accurate in our DisplayMate tests.

While the price point of this monitor is much higher than what you'd expect for a 20.1in model, the difference in colour reproduction is very noticeable. When running through photographs, colours were once again vibrant, skin tones were rendered accurately, while shadowed areas and fine details were clearly viewable. Meanwhile, bright colours stood out and dark colours were rich.

The uniformity of the screen was excellent during our tests, as we didn't notice any dull patches, and the screen was easily viewable from the sides, although images did look slightly more pale. With an 8ms grey-to-grey response time, video was displayed without any noticeable blurring in our tests.

Physically, the Eizo sits on a stand that not only swivels and rises, but also pivots, so you can change its orientation when viewing page layouts. USB ports are located on the left-hand side on the monitor and it even has speakers, although you wouldn't know by looking at it.

The controls for the on-screen display are easy to use and the menu system allows for comprehensive changes to be made to the monitor's colour and luminance settings. Furthermore, it has a sensor on the front panel, which, when enabled, can adjust the brightness of the monitor depending on the amount of ambient light present in your environment. This is a very handy feature which worked well during our evaluation. It'll automatically tone down the brightness when the room gets dark so that you don't get uncomfortable.

In a nutshell, the Eizo FlexScan S2231W is all class. It's one of the types of monitors, which as reviewers, we hate to look at because it makes our work screen look so darn lifeless. We don't have a problem recommending this monitor if photography is how you make your living, or even if it's a serious hobby. If you can afford it, you should definitely consider it.