The arguments in its favor are rather seductive: this is a 20 inch monitor whose ergonomics are much better than average and which doesn't look too bad either. 

But the arguments against are pretty stunning: is a 20 inch monitor at the price of a 24 inch really that tempting?  How can Nec justify itself?

With a height-adjustable stand mounted on a rotating base and a pair of built-in speakers, the LCD 205wxm demonstrates the best ergonomics of all of 20 inch monitors that we've tested this year.

No more nice surprises ...

The rest of the story is not so good, though.  Its 5ms panel delivers exactly what it promises:  just average reactivity.  It's good enough, and hardly a problem, but why be happy with something that's less good when you know that there's better available elsewhere and for the same price?  And bigger, too.

The input lag isn't too bad, with a delay of just one image compared to a fast CRT.


With an average gap between theoretical colors and those actually shown on the monitor, or a deltaE score of 5.2, you can hardly say that this screen's colors are true with default settings. Fortunately, after changing some of the settings, things get a lot better.  You have three possible solutions:

1 – use the OSD to apply the following settings: R=98.4%, G=93.7%, B=85.4% and a brightness of 85.1%.  Set up this way, the final score for color fidelity is 3 stars.

2 – use the color profile on the CD supplied by NEC.  The score for color fidelity would be 3 stars.

3 – download the color profile that we've made.  If it works, and if your screen is identical to the one tested in our labs, the colors score jumps up to 4 stars.