CMV 222H

Versatility abounds with the 222H, which can be connected to a big-screen TV, PC, set-top box, gaming console, DVD player or VCR. It has an HDMI input, as well as a D-sub input, and it also provides component, S-Video and composite connections, but lacks a DVI port.

It has a native resolution of 1680x1050, so it's not quite capable of displaying full high definition content, and its aspect ratio is 16:10, so black bars will still be present when watching DVDs. Depending on the quality of the DVD and the viewing distance, colour blotching and pixelation may be evident on the screen. This is primarily due to the large native resolution of the monitor and low resolution (720x576) of DVD movies.

Physically, we like the built-in media card reader on the left-hand side of the unit, and the swivelling base makes this relatively easy to access. It can handle all popular formats, such as SD, CompactFlash and Memory Stick. We're not too keen on the screen's controls though. These reside on the right-hand side of the monitor, and this means you have to swivel the monitor to look at the controls while making adjustments to the picture.

As for its image quality, it's not a bad monitor, but it does have a couple of slight uniformity and brightness problems; during our tests, the corners looked noticeably dark and discoloured.

Testing with DisplayMate, and using the HDMI connection, we observed decent contrast levels, especially on the extreme greyscale test, which showed all levels of light-grey on a white background. Its brightness level, however, made it hard to get all dark-grey levels to show up against a black background. Turning up the brightness to get more dark levels to show up made the overall picture look pale.

Black screens suffered a little from the seeping backlights at the top and bottom of the screen, and we also noticed a slight colour cast in the greyscale. Grey colours looked slightly yellow during our tests, and this was something we couldn't rectify by changing the colour temperature. We tested with the temperature at 7300K.

Image noise wasn't much of an issue with this screen; it was present in dark grey colours, but it wasn't overly noticeable, except when watching movies with a lot of black and grey colours. In the Windows desktop environment, it produced sharp images and text, while motion was also handled well; videos, scrolling test and games didn't exhibit any ghosting.

During our photo viewing tests, we observed slightly washed-out colours, especially in very light-coloured areas, but overall, the images looked quite good and the greyscale discolouration we noticed in DisplayMate wasn't an issue.

The screen's coating isn't glossy, so reflections from room lights aren't a problem, and its 170/160-degree horizontal/vertical angles specification is on-par with other 22in monitors that we've seen. When viewed from the sides, the end furthest away looked much darker than the near end of the screen, but the content of the screen remained viewable. Its vertical angle was a little fiddly, however, and required meticulous tilting to provide a comfortable viewing position.