We've been looking forward to testing the 2434Pw.  It has an attractive design and a good set of features for the price, so let's see how it does in our lab.

Handling: the basics are there, but no extras

The hardware options on offer are one of the few things you can trust when reading the specs for a monitor.  The 2434pw has a pretty decent selection, with a height-adjustable stand on a rotating base, as well as a pair of speakers and two video inputs: VGA and HDMI.  AOC hasn't gone as far as including extras like a USB hub or a card reader, and while these aren't essential, they certainly make life easier.

Responsiveness: 2 ms didn't work out, with reverse ghosting everywhere

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Average ghosting over ten frames

Unfortunately, the 2443pw hasn't escaped the same trap that other 2 ms monitors have fallen into recently: reverse ghosting.  It's hard to imagine a screen with this problem being much use for gaming.  Worse still, it's even visible when you move your mouse across the desktop, so we can't really recommend it for anything, even if you do notice it less while doing office work.  It's a shame, because with no input lag, it could have been great for multiplayer games.  If you need to brush up on how reverse ghosting works, we suggest you take a look at the inset of our review of the Philips 220CW9.

Colours: count on calibration

If the reverse ghosting wasn't already enough of a problem, this monitor's colour handling counts against it.  By default, the colours aren't accurate, with several problems: in particular, blue dominates, but the gamma, or the distribution of luminance across different shades of grey, is also wrong.  Put the whole thing together and the average discrepancy between the colours requested by the graphics card and those shown on screen, or deltaE, is 6.0.  That score needs to be below 3.0 before the problem is invisible to the naked eye.

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

We managed to improve--but not completely correct--the gamma problem by using the OSD to switch to gamma mode 3.  That only brought the deltaE down to 4.9, a long way behind the excellent 2.0 that the best screens manage.

The contrast ratio, on the other hand, wasn't too bad, at over 950:1, whereas other monitors average around 850:1.

Films

Having such a small screen makes it hard to spot too many of the problems.  If it was as bad as this on a 42'' display, it would be a lot less bearable.  But monitor manufacturers don't include the same kind of image correction circuitry that's standard in TVs, so it's hard to expect decent video results.  While you're waiting for things to change, we suggest you sit at least two metres back; using a video player that is good at upscaling, like the PlayStation 3, is another good idea.