Iiyama Prolite X2472HD

For a long time, Iiyama stuck resolutely to TN panels in its monitors.  But it's made a bold move and switched to PVA technology for its new Prolite X2472HD monitor.  Is it a step in the right direction or a stab in the dark?  Let's take a closer look ...

Hardware: wide viewing angles but not much else

If you're a regular reader, you might have noticed the similarities between this monitor and the Iiyama Prolite E2472HD.  You shouldn't be surprised: the X2472HD shares the same design as its TN-based colleague.  Iiyama's new look is much sleeker and up to date then the one it was using last year.

The X2472HD is based on a fixed stand that only allows you to tilt the display back a few degrees.  That means the only way it can hope to score some more points in this section is via the connectivity available, which is limited to VGA, DVI and HDMI inputs and a headphone jack. 

It does gain a few extra points thanks to its wider viewing angles.  Although a TN display looks black if you see it from below, a PVA display has even colours across the whole surface of the screen.  It's perfect for anybody with a large collection of photos!

Colours: a few small changes and you're good!

Speaking of colours, they're not a total disaster using the factory settings but can still be improved with a little tweaking.  The problem with the default settings is a strong blue tinge, something that can usually be changed by choosing a warmer pre-set.  In this case, though, the X2472HD is already in its warmest setting, so we had to manually adjust the values for Red, Green and Blue to 88, 78 and 80 respectively.


The deltaE, the average discrepancy between the colours requested by the graphics card and those actually shown on screen, falls from 3.8 to 2.5 when you make these adjustments.  A score like this means the X2472HD will satisfy anybody looking for a monitor that's capable of accurately reproducing colours.

The Iiyama X2472HD kept up the good work with a contrast ratio well in excess of the average value we've recorded across all the monitors we've tested, 850:1.  By default, the contrast ratio is above 3300:1, but when you make the adjustments above, it drops a little but still remains well above 2000:1, an excellent figure for a desktop monitor: some of them don't ever make it above 1000:1.

Responsiveness: if it moves, it's blurry!

Argh!  As far as I can remember, the X2472HD has to be one of the worst monitors at displaying fast-moving objects.  We often say that TN monitors with a 5 ms response time aren't suitable for gamers because they seem blurry when rendering fast-moving objects, but when we're talking about the X2472HD's PVA display, it's more accurate to talk about blur full stop.  The average ghosting time we recorded was 31 ms, meaning a third frame is already being drawn 15 ms after the first one should have disappeared.  It really isn't a good idea at all to try to play games on this monitor.

Responsiveness
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The input lag is within a normal range, and although it's not entirely absent, it's below the threshold of human visual perception for anybody who isn't sensible enough to take our advice and decides to try and game online with the X2472HD.

Movies

As well as the problem we mentioned in the inset, this monitor suffers from the usual difficulties when it comes to upscaling SD sources that we find on just about every monitor.  We suggest that you leave that job to a player-whether hardware or software based-which will do a much better a job of displaying SD video.