Iiyama ProLite E2710HDSD-1 review

The Iiyama ProLite E2710HDSD-1 is 27in display, yet it’s only 64mm thick which makes it ideal for wall mounting. It also has a four-way USB hub, with two USB ports on the rear next to the video inputs, plus another two on the left side of the case where they’re easily accessible from the front.

Inputs include VGA and DVI interfaces, plus two 3.5mm audio sockets. One is an input and the other an output for headphones. The built-in speakers impressed us. Although lacking in bass, sound was clear and quite loud. For YouTube or casual games, the internal speakers will serve you well.

The E2710HDSD-1’s styling is a bit pedestrian, with a plain black bezel and stand. The buttons for the menu are placed under the middle of the screen and are reasonably easy to access, although we aren’t big fans of Iiyama’s menu system, which uses white text on a grey background and is hard to read.

We were impressed by the evenness of the backlighting, although brightness from the fluorescent tubes wasn’t as high as some of the new LED displays here. We found contrast to be good; again, it’s not quite up to the standards of some LED screens, but you’d be hard pressed to notice the difference in everyday use. Colours were accurate after we’d tweaked the levels to eliminate a very slight yellow tint, and viewing angles were more than wide enough.

Image quality settings are fairly basic, and although there’s a dynamic contrast option (ACR), we found it far too slow to react to changes in brightness, and many scenes in The Dark Knight became far too dark to see make out what was being displayed. Turning on ACR disables all other controls. There are also presets, which exaggerated brightness or colour at the expense of natural image quality.

While it doesn’t have an HDMI input and doesn’t look particularly exciting, the E2710HDSD-1 is great value. Image quality is perfectly good and the four-port USB port is very useful. It wins our Best Buy award.