The 20 inch is not expensive! And at the date of publication of this article, we have here the most economical 20 inch found on our site.   The big advantage of the Iolair over its inexpensive IISonic rival is that its panel is normal and not an economical version with the biggest resolution.  In fact, the M2AABW (arrgh, but the name!) is a screen that is the epitome of standard except that its price is very low.  The good news is that performances are also normal and not rock bottom as we could have expected.

Actually, some nice surprises!

In particular, we didn’t expect miracles from its panel whose announced response time is 5 ms.  However, in practice it’s better than what monitors of this type usually produce.  If we had to put a value to its reactivity, we would say it’s more like a 3 ms with behavior quite close to the most reactive screens on the market , the 2 ms.  For this reason, its score, automatically calculated based on our measurements, is halfway between these two categories (a good 2 ms often finishes with 4 stars while a classic 5 ms is at 2 stars).


It’s the same for colors.  We are used to catastrophic rendering on the entry level.  Here, it’s not what we could call a calibrated screen, but it’s definitely within reason.  The average difference (average dE) between ideal colors and those actually displayed is 4 while no color blows measurements off the charts.  To improve these settings, we can still manually decrease default blue levels as color temperature starts off at 7400 Kelvin which is a bit cold.  As for the gamma, it’s very good at 2.3 and there is no need for adjustment.  Darker zones aren’t saturated and lighter ones aren’t burned out.  Do not lower brightness as on our test screen, this only hurt contrast, which was initially quite good (715:1), while not improving depth in black.

Its weakness:  ergonomics and our first ''zero star'' in this area

Colors and reactivity, two very important areas in tests, are rather good (even if they are inferior to what we find on the slightly more expensive Iiyama E2200WS).  So it was in ergonomics that costs were cut and here indeed there isn’t much.  There is a VGA input and that’s it.