A big thank you to Amazon France who lent us this screen for testing while our requests from IISonic have gone unanswered.

Can we buy the least expensive of LCD 20 inch screens and expect good results? Yes! Even if it is half the cost of most of its rivals, the IISonic IIM20NB should be somewhat satisfactory and the good news is that it is.  In the beginning, however, its characteristics could seem scary.  This is a 4/3 format screen which differs from the current trend of 16/10.  This means this screen is less adapted for movies but much more practical for the office and navigation on line.  There is one detail that raises an eyebrow: its native resolution of 1400 x 1050 pixels.  If you want a perfectly clean and sharp image, you should stick with this 1400 x 1050 resolution while other 20 inch 4/3 screens (becoming rare) are in 1600 x 1200.  The inconvenience is that less information is displayed on the IISonic monitor and the advantage is that you will gain in readability.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Moreover, if you are a gamer, there will be better fluidity as the calculation of images is 23 % lighter.

Reactivity and colors: they hold their own

Our second fear was this screen’s claimed response time of 8 ms.  This is a characteristic which we haven’t seen for about a year now.  All TN panel equipped monitors have now made the transition to 5 ms. So does the IIM20NB have 40% more afterglow? No.  In terms of TN panels, all 5, 6 and 8 ms are in reality strictly identical and are equally reactive or rather subject to the same amount of afterglow in fast sequences.   In the same way, 2, 3 and 4 ms are equivalent.  In fact, this is more a question of an unrefined standard not representative of a monitor’s real reactivity.  From this we don’t mean to say that the IISonic screen is fast, but simply that it’s not slower than other 5 ms TNs.  Expect to see in certain games several layers of your character in rapid movements or ghosting effects in tracking shots in movies.  Nothing too dramatic, however.

And finally, how about colors ? We were expecting the worst from a very inexpensive screen but it wasn’t the case.  Reds, greens, blues and their gradations were very well rendered and from a visual point of view we don’t have any criticism.  On the other hand, grays are less pleasant and not too correctible.  In darker ones, blue is stronger while lacking in lighter shades, which are consequently a bit pinkish.  If you try to correct this manually in the OSD, there are some improvements but defects are also accentuated.   The only solution is to use a colorimeter which one rarely has on hand for a screen at this price.