ViewSonic VX2476-SMHD-S 24" FHD Monitor

There aren't a lot of decent IPS panel screens in this sort of pricerange. Only a few are even competition for this one -- most of them much older with fewer features. So for this range I'd say this one is a pretty decent choice and probably one of the better choices in fact. There are mostly just a few things keeping it from being great. First, the settings are just... bad. The default settings it offers for a lot of things are bad. In particular, if you set it for gaming it will, by default, set the "response time" setting to "advanced." Which sounds good, right? Except this does some sort of processing that actually creates significant ghosting (leading several people to believe the seemingly high latencies are just too high. But 7ms actually wouldn't result in the ghosting you see with this at all. In fact, that would be more on the order of as high as 15 or maybe even 20ms... My best guess -- and this is just a guess -- is that "response time" settings of advanced or ultra actually enable some sort of predictive image processing that does more harm than good.) Setting this manually to "standard" corrects the ghosting. I was able to play very fast-paced games with zero problems once I set that to standard, so the 7ms response time that scares so many people is actually fine. (And there are actually multiple ways of measuring response time -- in fact there are different responses that SHOULD be measured and provided to the customer but of course are not -- so 7ms is not actually as far off from what a modern TN panel 5ms or lower screen might actually do in actual practice.) Also, color and lighting settings are rather hard and confusing to get actually right. For example, sRGB actually sets a very warm rather than neutral color. I've had to manually set a lot. Unfortunately, I don't have anything to calibrate a monitor with (it's surprisingly hard to find anything for external calibration in fact -- I'm getting an ancient Spyder 2 for software calibration, but it really would have been better to find the right settings for changing the settings to be right.) When I set advanced DCR to 0, black stabilization to 50 (it's hard to figure this one out in particular, but so far I think 50 is closest to correct, but I'm a bit torn between 50 and 60 depending) contrast to 50, brightness down to my preference (35, probably just slightly higher would be a bit more ideal for many people,) and the colors to user controlled (100% each to RGB for now -- I need to figure out how to tweak this to get it more neutral still, but this is pretty good for a start) it gets pretty close to something that feels very neutral and realistic looking. Yellows in particular seem a bit odd though, so I'm still not quite sure and will be looking for a way to calibrate it better via these settings someday. Once you get the settings right overall it's pretty nice though and certainly good enough for most purposes (close enough even for many image manipulation purposes I think, though if you need 100% sRGB this won't do I'm sure.) I think with the right settings it could be pretty incredible in fact, it's just a matter of figuring them out (which I haven't quite gotten just yet.) With my current settings though most test photos, scenes of nature, and etc look pretty amazing now. One HUGE point against it is the stand is absolute crap. They really screwed the pooch on this part actually. First, you can't get a third party thing. No VESA mount holes or anything like that to work with. As far as I know the stand doesn't use any sort of standard connection (it's something that snaps into the bottom.) The problem is, it screws loosely into a single bar that goes up to the monitor. And no matter how tight you get it it can still be fairly loose. Now, to be clear, the flat wood desk I've set it on is almost completely level (less than a degree off. Nothing major.) But no matter how tightly I turned the screw (and it stripped the head a little I was turning so hard) the stand will not stay straight. For some reason it even leans away from the direction the desk is ever so slightly off by, so I know it's 100% the stand at fault here. And it just stands to reason that with just a tiny thin little bar screwing in like that there will be potential for this sort of problem. That's why most stands that snap in like this one does at least are much wider. I had to add so much padding to the left side that it raises it by almost a full FIVE millimeters. (Conversely my desk is off level by probably about two folds of a sheet of paper, not even a single millimeter.) Since there are no screw holes whatsoever you can't even use a third party stand. You're just stuck compensating for a screen that may or may not tilt severely. And honestly, this is the biggest reason I deduct two stars from its rating since once one gets the right settings they can share with others but fixing the stand being off level requires a fair bit of work. I got some foam material for only a dollar that I was able to cut and stick to the bottom of it in layers, so I guess this is easy enough to fix, but I do call them out on this horrible choice in design with this stand. It may be pretty to look at, but in actual usage it's just horrible. Especially sticking up on one side with material propping it up. I used a craft foam with a sticky back (1.5mm thick in this case) bought locally for only a dollar and I can't seem to find something quite equivalent to it here, but uxcell 2Pcs 12mm Wide 1mm Thick EVA Single Side Sponge Foam Tape 10 Meters Length might be a good choice for anyone else needing to deal with this in the same basic way. Finally the backlight bleedthrough isn't nice. This, unfortunately, is standard for cheaper IPS panels, so I don't hold this particularly against this one. This is only a problem if you're doing something with a lot of blacks like certain games and maybe some movies. Probably not much photo work but if you're looking at an IPS panel definitely don't look at cheaper ones like this. One thing to note here though: it's actually pretty uniform. Most IPS panels I've used are very non-uniform in their bleedthrough. Usually it's one or two corners and could be either the top or the bottom. And the bleedthrough tends to be pretty extreme. You'll have a spot that looks practically white while all the rest around it is black. In this monitor's case it's both better and worse. Where those are confined to a really small area this one has it much more uniformly spread out. Which means there's a much larger area affected by bleedthrough making blacks all around suffer, but it's also a lot less actual bleedthrough in each area in comparison so the blacks don't suffer as much where they do. Which one is better or worse is more down to personal preference than anything else, but I suppose overall this is less bad probably since it's more uniform and less disruptive. I think there is a LOT of potential here. I believe with the right settings it could have pretty amazing color especially. I think for its price range it might potentially even be one of the best options available. There are a rare few that can be cheaper and a few others in this range, but the visual quality is the most important in an IPS panel and I think maybe it might have an edge or two there for this pricerange. If you're willing to go up to ranges more like $500 then this is not the way to go, but for this low price it beats at least those others I've compared it with in actual visual quality after I set it right. The stand is a huge screwup, but at least it's not too hard to compensate with the right materials. I do not believe the user should have to do this though and packing material under one side to prop it up defeats any fashion benefits of its design anyway, so it just plain needs to go and be replaced with a real stand instead of the awful ultra-thin bar triangle thing. UPDATE: The Spyder2 arrived. After a lot of hard work tracking down drivers they've removed from their primary site I finally managed to find the old drivers from before they took them all down (ironically on their Japanese website.) It turns out their software supports calibrating the screen's built-in controls before creating a color profile. I found that with the standard 2.2-6500K calibration it told me to set the red to 100, green to 91, and blue to 88. This ends up being about 6467K which is as close as it could get with the RGB output as close to even as it will get (the blue is either too little or too much by a slight margin and green is off as well by a very tiny amount, but overall all three end up pretty close and well within the acceptable range.) Brightness can go higher and this will affect the output somewhat, but any brighter bothers my eyes, so I can't provide adjusted values at a higher setting. Curiously enough this is actually really close to what sRGB produces, however sRGB has way too much green according to the calibration tool. On the other hand, the ICM it produces after calibrating with manual RGB control overcompensates on the greens such that grays have a greenish tint to them, so perhaps the sRGB setting actually _IS_ accurate. Why it feels too warm to me I couldn't say, but if you want as close to sRGB as possible it may still be best just to use that built in profile. I'm also using the ICM that ViewSonic provides via their monitor driver though I don't see much difference with and without. Without something external or a newer, higher quality calibration tool to compare I can't calibrate better than that.