Viewsonic VX2453mh-LED review

LED-backlit displays are becoming the norm these days, and Viewsonic’s thin VX2453mh-LED is a good example. It’s only 36mm thick, which means there’s no room for an integrated power supply, but it also has two HDMI ports as well as an analogue VGA port. There’s also no room for a set of internal speakers, but instead you get an audio output jack that can be used with headphones.

Manufacturers’ claims of “mega” contrast ratios (in this case, an implausibly round figure of 30,000,000:1) should be taken with a truckload of salt. Contrast is certainly good, and the VX2453mh-LED has an even backlight that we found brighter than most LED models we’ve seen. We noticed a bit of backlight bleed-through at the edges of the screen, though.

On the whole, image quality is good. We found colours natural and punchy despite the matt finish on the screen. There’s a User colour setting as well as five presets, but we set the colour temperature to 6500K, as the sRGB setting made it too dark and disabled the Brightness and Contrast controls. Apart from these, there aren’t any other image quality controls, but apart from small tweaks dependent on your room’s lighting, you shouldn’t need more.

However we found the VX2453mh-LED was fussy with inputs. Connecting to a Windows 7 laptop via HDMI, we found the desktop was over-scaled, and while you can adjust the scaling via your graphics card’s control panel, we found it impossible to get a pixel-for-pixel image, so text especially suffered from aliasing. An HDMI connection to our PlayStation 3 via HDMI was perfect, however.

Switching to the VGA connection, the desktop scaled perfectly – but in some of our more detailed tests using fine vertical lines, we noticed tearing and colour distortion, which meant that the monitor wasn’t quite in sync. This was easily fixed by selecting the VX2453mh-LED’s Auto Image Adjust menu option.

Even with the monitor set up correctly, we still noticed colour distortion around very small text. In everyday use this shouldn’t be a problem, but those who work with images for a living will require more precision. A generous three-year, collect-and-return warranty also gives you peace of mind.

The VX2453mh-LED looks like great value at £148, but the scaling problems with digital inputs let it down and there are alternatives you should consider. The Iiyama ProLite E2409HDS may look slightly less exciting, but its CCFL backlight is warmer and it worked fine with both DVI and HDMI inputs.