Edge10 EF240A review

Edge10 is a UK company that specialises in producing monitors for niche industries, but it also comes up with some stunning bargains from time to time. The EF240a is a prime example, being a 24in monitor that’s on sale for just £107. That’s about the same price as the budget 22in monitors from well-known manufacturers. It has a Full HD resolution, LED backlighting and it comes with a choice of VGA or DVI inputs, and Edge10 even offers a three year onsite warranty.

Its design is fairly boring, with cheap black plastic used throughout. It’s not very thin either, although it does have VESA mounts on the rear of the case for wall mounting. The stand only allows for tilting, and you’ll have to adjust it carefully to get the best angle because viewing angles are fussy. Even a few degrees impacts an image’s contrast.

Our first concern is its menu system, which is fairly crude and controlled by buttons slung underneath the front of the screen. They’re marked by icons on the bezel above them, but, confusingly, the buttons don’t seem to match the icons. The plus and minus icons actually go up and down in the selection, rather than changing values, while the arrow buttons to the right don’t seem to do much at all. You use the menu button itself to select an item.

Thankfully, there are many options to play with. Along with brightness and contrast, you get three ‘Eco’ presets, which simply dim the backlight by certain amounts, and a dynamic contrast option that changes the brightness of the backlight in response to the brightness of the currently displayed image. Predictably, it caused sudden and distracting changes in luminosity while watching movies, such as the transition in Casino Royale from Bond’s meeting with M in the sunny Bahamas to the train snaking through the dark Montenegrin countryside, so we left it disabled.

Sadly, you get limited control over colour temperature, the choices being a cold 9300K, a more balanced 6500K and a User option that lets you adjust red, green and blue values separately. The 6500K setting is actually fairly accurate, although our calibration software tells us it’s only 84% of sRGB, with blues and greens being the most inaccurate.

Contrast is also surprisingly good. In the night-time airport scene in Casino Royale, we were able to make out the seams in the bad guy’s black leather shoes, while in the sunny scenes in the Bahamas, the cloqué pattern on M’s cream jacket was still mostly visible.

The EF240a has few niggles other than its fiddly and illogical menu system. There’s no support for HDCP over DVI, which means you won’t be able to play copy-protected movies directly from a Blu-ray player. You do, however, get a set of tinny speakers, which is a surprise on a budget monitor. They’re not very loud, but they’ll do for watching YouTube videos in the absence of a dedicated speaker system.

However, such details are irrelevant. This is a 24in monitor with acceptable image quality and a three year onsite warranty for only £107. It’s unbeatable value, and it wins our Budget Buy award.