Asus VW246H review

With its 24in, full HD 1,920×1,080 screen, the VW246H is clearly built for entertainment.

Its glossy black case makes it look more like a TV than a monitor, and it has a set of built-in speakers. Our only niggle is that while the patterned base might look nice, it’s a magnet for dust and tricky to clean.

The 2W stereo speakers are surprisingly good. Like all monitor speakers, they lack bass and can sound a little hollow and tinny, particularly in the middle of an action film or frenetic first-person shooter, but volume is good enough for a small room or bedroom and they’re punchy.

It’s image quality that’s really important, though. The VW246H starts well, as Asus provides a decent range of options in the onscreen menu, including the ability to tweak brightness, contrast, sharpness, saturation, colour and skin tones. There are also preset image modes, but we found that changing the custom settings manually was the best option. The onscreen menus are very easy to use, so adjusting settings to get a picture you’re happy with is pretty easy.

Picture quality was generally very good, with natural colours producing a vibrant picture. We found that contrast wasn’t perfect, though, and detail could be lost. Adjusting the brightness and contrast to get decent blacks made bright scenes a little dull, and adjusting the other way tended to wash out blacks. We didn’t see a big improvement from the dynamic contrast ratio. It’s not helped by the uneven backlight, which made the picture darker towards the middle.

Movies generally looked good, but we found that picking the warmer colour temperature helped, as the default colour mode’s blue-tinted whites could be a little harsh on the eye.

None of these issues is a deal breaker, though, and in general desktop use the VW246H was absolutely fine. The built-in speakers add extra interest, but better monitors are available for less and we’d rather have Philips’ 23in 230C1 display instead.