Viewsonic TD2420 review

The Viewsonic TD2420 is a 23.6in touchscreen display with a 1,920×1,080 resolution. It looks a lot less intimidating than the last Viewsonic touchscreen monitor we looked at, the TD2340, and its smaller base takes up much less room on your desk. Its fixed, chunky stand might not match its glossy bezel, but it looks smart, and would look great in an office.

Unlike the TD2340, this monitor only supports two-point touch and comes with a stylus that slots into the lower left corner of the bezel. The stylus should minimise messy fingerprints on the touchscreen, but we found the display’s hard 7H scratch-resistant coating created more friction than we’d like when we used the stylus. We felt as if we had to apply more force than should be necessary to use the stylus, which made us not want to use it all. Indeed, the stylus made using the TD2420 feel nowhere near as smooth as using a touchscreen laptop or flicking through web pages on the TD2340 with your fingers.

Even so, we much preferred using the stylus to using our fingers, as the screen felt as if had even greater resistance when we tried to scroll down the screen without it. The stylus also made it much easier to display the Windows 8 Charms bar and switch between windows, as its thick bezel isn’t well suited to carrying out these actions with your fingers. We had to dig our fingers right into the side of the screen in order to swipe across accurately, and even then it didn’t always work.

The TD2420’s overall image quality was quite disappointing. Our colour calibrator revealed it was showing just 86.3 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut at its default settings straight out of the box, which is quite poor, even for a TN panel. Its blue coverage was very good, but it was short in both the green and red areas of the colour gamut, which meant images appeared much cooler than they should. We weren’t able to increase this score after calibration either, so it’s not particularly appropriate for fine photo editing or graphic design.

This certainly seemed to be the case in our subjective image tests. Compared with our reference monitor, colours were much less vibrant in our high contrast test photos, with warmer colours suffering in particular. We measured a contrast ratio of 736:1 before calibration, which is a little lower than Viewsonic’s claimed 1,000:1 ratio, but while we were able to pick out a good level of detail in the lighter areas of our photos, we weren’t so successful when we tried to pick out darker shadow detail. Its glossy, reflective finish made them quite difficult to see in the first place, but once we saw past the reflections these areas were often simply black without any finer detail.

In our tests we saw that the Viewsonic TD2420 had good blue coverage before calibration, but red and green coverage was very weak …

… unfortunately, we couldn’t see improvements in the Viewsonic TD2420’s colour accuracy after calibration

Our solid colour image tests were more promising. Here, its glossy finish really helped our reds, greens and blues stand out and they looked almost as good as our reference monitor. Its blacks weren’t quite as deep, though, even with a low black level reading of 0.35cd/m², and whites were a little grey, particularly toward the top of the screen. We didn’t see any signs of backlight bleeding, though.

The TD2420 has a good number of inputs, but nothing out of the ordinary for a monitor at this price. Located underneath a plastic lip behind the stand, you’ll find VGA, DVI-D, HDMI inputs, a USB downstream port to enable the touchscreen, a 3.5mm audio line in and a headphone jack. It also has a pair of integrated 2W speakers.

The Viewsonic TD2420 isn’t the best touchscreen monitor we’ve seen, but it’s certainly one of the cheapest. If you want a cheap touchscreen monitor then it’s a good option, it just isn’t as smooth in use as the touchscreens on high quality laptops. You could pay more for the Viewsonic TD2340, which recognises 10 fingers at once, giving you greater control over onscreen objects, but the TD2420 is a good budget touchscreen monitor.