Iiyama ProLite XU2390HS-B1 review

The Iiyama ProLite XU2390HS-B1 is a budget monitor designed for an office environment. With a stylish frame and a very thin bezel, the 23in, 1,920×1,080 IPS screen certainly looks the part, and with a price under £130, it’s the kind of screen you could buy for a multi-monitor setup without breaking the bank.

With the monitor’s low price comes a basic design. When the screen is switched off, the bezel seems almost non-existent, but when you turn it on it’s clear there’s around a centimetre gap around the edge of the panel. In order to keep the front of the device as plain as possible, Iiyama has placed the display adjustment buttons on the bottom of the monitor frame without labelling them. This makes the setting up process a bit of fumble; we found ourselves accidentally turning the monitor off on several occasions.

The build quality of the unit is about what we expect from a monitor at this price; the stand is quite wobbly and the screen keeps moving for a few moments after a prod. There’s also no height adjustment or swivel built into the stand, so you’ll need to make your own arrangements to get the screen at the right height.

The XU2390HS-B1 has fairly generous connectivity considering its price. DVI, HDMI and VGA ports are all present, with the latter a welcome addition for those planning on connecting the screen to an older laptop which may not have digital ports, or who want to run multiple monitors from a PC with only DVI and VGA outputs. There’s no USB hub, but we wouldn’t expect one on a screen this price.

The screen performed well in our tests. We use a USB calibrator and open-source calibration software to test colour accuracy, and these showed the XU2390HS-B1 to be displaying 92.8 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut out of the box. We were able to increase this to 93.1 per cent simply by switching the monitor to its sRGB colour preset, but weren’t able to improve accuracy further through calibration. These figures are about what we would expect to see from a budget panel.

The screen also has deep blacks; we measured black levels as just 0.2cd/m2, showing very little light was coming through from the screen’s backlight. Contrast levels were equally good, at just under 1000:1. The combination of high contrast, low black levels and fair colour accuracy meant our test photographs looked rich and detailed while our solid red, blue and green test images appeared bright and vivid.

The Iiyama ProLite XU2390HS-B1 is certainly a no-frills monitor, but it does everything a basic monitor needs to and does it well, with fair colour accuracy and good contrast leading to pleasing images. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great screen for the price and a Budget Buy.