Iiyama Prolite E2410HDS

Iiyama's latest 24'' monitor is the new E2410HDS.  With a Full HD 1920 x 1080 display that uses a TN panel with a 2 ms response time, it has just two fluorescent backlights in place of the usual four.  The aim is to reduce energy consumption without having to rely on LEDs.

That's paid off, with energy usage hardly reaching 25 W when brightness is 200 cd/m².  For comparison, an LED-backlit monitor of the same size like the E2472HDS, which has a reputation for being energy efficient, uses just 23 W in similar circumstances

Hardware: the bare bones

The VGA, DVI and HDMI ports make up most of the E2410HDS' score in this section.  Alongside them, there's a pair of built-in speakers and a headphone jack.  That might well be a fairly standard configuration, but it's a fairly unambitious offering given everything else that can be included on a monitor like a USB hub, card reader or height-adjustable stand.  It isn't worth any more than two stars.

Responsiveness: we've seen faster

Responsiveness
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The OverDrive feature improves responsiveness, and once you set it to level 3, the E2410HDS is capable of displaying fast-moving objects much more smoothly than a TN monitor with a 5 ms panel.  There are, though, other 2 ms displays with a shorter ghosting time.  One such example is the HannsG HL251DPB, where we measured a time of 9 ms against the 13 ms achieved here by Iiyama.  Remember that the shorter the ghosting time, the sharper fast-moving objects will look.

Important: don't increase the OverDrive above level 3, as you risk seeing reverse ghosting, a very visible visual artefact in the opposite colours to the moving object.

The input lag is low enough to be invisible to the naked eye, and so it won't have any impact on your performance at your next LAN party.

Colours: some set up needed

Using the factory settings, there are several problems with the way the E2410HDS reproduces colours.  The most critical is an incorrect distribution of luminance, pushing the gamma from 2.2 to 2.0, and a slight blue tinge, meaning the colour tempertaute is at 7000 K instead of 6500 K.  Add in a few other minor worries and the average deltaE climbs to 4.5; this value needs to be below 3.0 for a monitor to be able to claim to reproduce colours accurately.


The good news is that it's entirely possible to reduce the deltaE and get it down below 3.0 by adjusting a few settings.  First of all, change the brightness to 90, and then on the Colours tab, change the gamma to mode 2 and set red, green and blue to 94, 94 and 88 respectively.  After these changes, the colour reproduction is much better and the deltaE is just 2.6.

There is some bad news too, though: these adjustments also reduce the contrast ratio, which falls from 813:1 to 766:1.  In our eyes that's a very small loss for such a big gain in colour reproduction.

Movies: blurriness definitely visible

When showing a film, computer monitors always struggle with upscaling SD content without adding a noticeable amount of blur.  Only a dedicated player (either hardware or software based) can improve things by doing the hard work of upscaling before the signal reaches the monitor.  The blur on the E2410HDS is particularly bad, and after several attempts at reducing it, we oddly enough found the text mode to be the best way around it.  The problem is still there, but it's much less visible.