Asus LS221H - DigitalVersus

Asus LS221H


Pixmania.co.uk	173.00
Amazon Marketplace UK	201.96




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Diagonal screen size	22 pouces
Type	TN
Resolution	1680 x 1050 pixels
Response time	2 ms
Interfaces (HDMI / DVI / VGA / YUV)	1 / 0 / 1 / 0
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Options	Glossy screen
Viewing angles (H/V)
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Alexandre Botella
Test date: October 29, 2008

Side-on

Pretty thin, huh? That's the LS221H viewed side-on up against a regular ball-point pen.

To reduce the size of their monitor, Asus has opted for a separate power adaptor. It's ugly, but doesn't get in the way too much if you can stash it under your desk. Fortunately, it hasn't provoked a spike in the energy consumption of the LS221H, unlike some screens that we've tested that opted for the same solution.

Another innovation is putting all of the ports at the base of the stand, rather than in the monitor itself, which is great because it makes them a lot easier to access. The disadvantage is that it makes the stand a lot bulkier, which means the whole thing isn't that much lighter overall, despite the very thin screen.

As with Asus' other products, the LS221H makes the most of an elegant design with excellent build quality. The glossy screen is outlined by a band of dark brown plastic that almost looks like an artificial leather trim. The whole thing is covered by a clear plastic panel.

It's a very simple idea, and is effective at protecting the screen itself from fingerprints, scratches or other marks, and fortunately, it doesn't add a glossy layer to a matte screen. With the monitor turned off, it's certainly more prone to reflections from ambient light sources than conventional matte screens, but once it's turned it on, they largely disappear.

Handling

The only exception is if you're looking at the monitor with a very bright light source directly behind you.

Even on dark scenes, reflections aren't visible

Connectivity options include analog VGA and digital DVI options, but the monitor lacks some of the extras we've seen elsewhere such as a rotating stand, card reader or webcam.

Gaming

Responsiveness

Despite Asus' claims that this monitor has a 2 ms response time, the LS221H gave us a nasty surprise. The results were beyond doubt: reverse ghosting was very evident with particular shades. As you can see from this example of our ghosting test card, moving bright shades suffer a lot of ghosting against a dark background:

This problem is caused by the monitor's technology not working as it should. Asus has tried to push its components to the limit in an attempt to eliminate ghosting, but has ended up doing the opposite. What's worse is that it's impossible to turn this feature off using the OSD, meaning that this 2 ms screen ends up worse than a 5 ms screen ...

Color handling

Colours, on the other hand, are well-handled, with a deep black and an excellent contrast ratio of 1000:1 with a very faithful representation of most shades. We also have to salute an excellent deltaE score of 2.2, meaning that colors on screen are very close to those requested by the graphics card.