Iiyama Prolite B2209HDS

It's time for us to test another Iiyama monitor, and today, it's the turn of the Prolite B2209HDS, a 22'' display with a 16:9 ratio.  On paper at least, it combines a great response time, a handy stand and an affordable price tag.

Hardware: a large (but versatile) stand

Traditionally, monitors from Iiyama's B range like the B2409HDS or the B2403WS have a great stand.  The B2209HDS doesn't look that great, but it does a pivot mode and is height-adjustable, meaning you can adjust it to suit your workspace perfectly.  It features a standard range of connectors, including VGA, DVI and HDMI for video and a headphone jack and 2 x 3 W speakers for audio.

Responsiveness: watch out for reverse ghosting

Because of some slight reverse ghosting, the ghosting time reaches an average of 17 ms, which is a lot higher than what the best 2 ms TN displays manage.   For comparison, the HannsG HL251, which we tested recently and which has a 2 ms TN panel, doesn't go above 9 ms.  In practice, that means the B2209HDS isn't the best choice for gamers, even if it does render fast movements more smoothly than a 5 ms TN display.

Responsiveness
Light Background	Dark Background	Average

This graph shows the time, measured in ms, that the monitor takes to entirely remove the previous frame. The shorter the time, the more fluid moving images will appear

Colours: needs some tweaking, or calibration

With its factory settings, the B2209HDS suffers from a strong blue tinge and an uneven distribution of luminance, and the overall accuracy of its colour reproduction suffers as a result.  In particular, flesh tones look purple.


Using the menu to switch to the sRGB colour space leads to a marked improvement.  The colour temperature falls, reducing that blue tinge, and luminance is also distributed more evenly.  The deltaE falls from 7.8 to 4, but that's still above the magic figure of 3, below which remaining discrepancies are invisible to the naked eye.  As things stand, the only way to improve the situation further is to try a calibration profile to bring the deltaE down further.

The contrast isn't too impressive either: we measured a ratio of 722:1, below the average of 850:1 that we've found across all of our monitor tests to date.

Movies: blurry!

When we tried watching a film, we soon discovered that the B2209HDS suffers from the same problems with upscaling SD content as other monitors.  Only using a dedicated player-hardware or software-can improve the results by doing the upscaling for you.  Worse still, there's a lot of blurriness, and, after several attempts to reduce it, we discovered that text mode was the best way to reduce it, but blurriness is still there, even if less noticeable.