Lenovo ThinkVision L2251x

Lenovo's ThinkVision L2251X is a 22'' monitor with a 5 ms TN panel which has a resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels.  This spec means it's going against the grain, with the current trend dictating that monitors from 22'' right up to 28'' become Full HD.  The benefit of the 16:10 aspect ratio offered here is that it text appears larger, which is an obvious advantage for office use.

Hardware: little extras save the day

The stand is a good start, as it's height adjustable, rotates and also allows the display the be pivoted round to portrait mode.  The bezel takes up the baton, with a three-port USB hub, a webcam and a mic all built-in.  It's connectivity that's lacking, with just one VGA input and a single DisplayPort at the back.  We would have preferred a HDMI connector, especially given that DisplayPort hasn't exactly taken off as an output for graphics cards: that means for a lot of people, VGA will be the only option. 

Responsiveness: fast movements end up blurry

Coloured    Transparent
Average ghosting over ten frames

Our tests confirmed what we already knew: this is a 5 ms monitor.  That means it won't be able to keep up with all of the games you want to try.  Any that have particularly fast movement risk lacking fluidity.  It will, on the other hand, be perfectly at home for office tasks.

The almost total lack of input lag also made us wish for a better response time: with such little lag, it could have been great for multiplayer games.

Colours: calibrate it quickly!

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

Under the factory settings, the colours are all wrong: whites are too red and greys are too blue for instance.  A rather unfortunate division of luminance across different shades of grey was also visible, and it wasn't something we managed to fix.  We ended up with a deltaE score that was bad as when we got it out of the box: 6.0.

The contrast ratio goes a little way to improving these poor colours.  At almost 900:1, it's just above average.