ASUS VW222

The ASUS VW222 is a 22in LCD monitor with a native resolution of 1680x1050. With its excellent image quality and brightness, it is ideal for both business and gaming use. It certainly has the style and speed of a gaming monitor but the speakers are a quandary as they don't deliver the kind of quality a gamer would demand.

The speakers are not capable of pumping out high fidelity sound at high volume. In fact, they are barely capable of high volume at all. Many gamers prefer headphones to speakers and those that use speakers would probably steer clear of integrated ones. Regardless, those willing to play games using the built-in speakers will end up being disappointed as it doesn't deliver the goods, so to speak. Sound tends to appear distant or hollow with very little bass and a general lack of depth. The volume level isn't high enough to annoy your cat, let alone annoy your neighbours, and a lack of audio separation, especially with gaming sound effects, makes background audio sound messy and muddled.

These kinds of speakers may well appeal to the office user who has no need of high quality sound or high volume range. To the office user, basic sound capabilities are more than enough in an environment where the image quality takes centre stage.

The VW222 passed all our image quality tests with flying colours. The DisplayMate Video Edition tests were flawless and the gaming tests were impressively delivered. We tested the speed of the display and found that it was in keeping with the claimed 2ms response rate. There was no ghosting or undue motion blur. Colour was handled well, although it greatly varied among the pre-set colour modes. There are five presets in total which can be selected at the press of a button depending on what content you are viewing.

While colour presets are all well and good, sometimes you just want to get in there and get your hands dirty. Unfortunately, tweaking the image is not as easy as it should be since there are very few on-screen calibration options. Outside of the presets, there is very little you can do to find an image you are comfortable with.

The VW222 has a very basic, yet elegant design with a thin black bezel and only five buttons on the facade. There are no volume buttons, so if you want to adjust the volume, you will need to do so from within the monitor settings themselves. As you can imagine, this can become frustrating in a short amount of time.

With many monitors being released with a 178-degree horizontal viewing angle, we felt that the 170 degrees being offered by the VW222 could have been better. The vertical viewing angle is only 160 degrees, but since the screen can be tilted both backward and forward, we never experienced any vertical colour shift. There was also a little back light bleeding at the bottom of the screen which only becomes noticeable when the screen is totally black.