w2207

Physically, HP's w2207 22in is an impressive specimen. It's got a stand that can swivel, tilt, rise and rotate (it can be viewed in portrait mode, which is perfect for working on long documents); it's got a built-in USB hub for up to two devices, and it has very easy to use controls. It's a user-friendly monitor, and we were able to adjust its settings with a minimum of fuss to achieve an almost perfect picture.

Testing with DisplayMate at the screen's native resolution of 1680x1050, the screen showed almost flawless colour reproduction. Its greyscale doesn't fall victim to too much discolouration -- there was only a very slight skew towards yellow -- and its primary and secondary colours were vibrant without being overly rich. Luminance tests showed good dynamics with all dark grey levels visible on a black background and all light grey levels visible on a white background in DisplayMate's Extreme Greyscale test.

Text wasn't crystal clear (we tested using Clear Type fonts under Windows Vista). Purple fringing was visible at most sizes (10-point through to 18-point) with black text on a white background. However, it wasn't as bad on this monitor as it was on some other monitors we've tested. In particular Windows' menus and menu items all look clean and sharp. There was some noise in mid-level grey colours, but this wasn't noticeable until we went looking for it. During everyday use, it shouldn't be a nuisance.

What might be a nuisance is the reflectivity of the screen. We tested in a fluorescently-lit office environment and background lights that caused reflections often required the angle of the screen to be changed. Videos will probably suffer most from the reflections, especially DVDs, which tend to be darker, but the screen does a great job of displaying DVDs when the viewing environment is dark. We tested with the Matrix and found the definition in the images to be quite good and the screen had an excellent black level. Dark and shadowed areas were shown well, too, and there wasn't a hint of motion blur. Likewise, we tested motion blur by running up 3DMark06 and by scrolling text in both Web pages and long Word documents. Blurring wasn't an issue. As for its viewable angles, the monitor was clearly viewable from all sides, but there were noticeable reflections from ceiling lights.

Loading up a selection of photographs, we observed excellent clarity and definition (images of furs and feathers were clearly displayed). Shadowed and dark photographs didn't pose a problem for the screen, and colours weren't overly rich. All up, it performed exceptionally in this portion of our tests.