Iiyama Prolite XB2374HDS review

Iiyama is late to the party with the XB2374HDS – an IPS panel with Full HD resolution that costs just £155 – because we’ve already seen budget IPS panels from LG, AOC and Philips. The XB2374HDS is slightly classier than its rivals. In addition to its IPS panel, it has a fully adjustable stand and a choice of VGA, DVI or HDMI inputs.

Iiyama’s design is plain and understated. The same matt-black plastic is used throughout most of the case, and there are no flashy design flourishes to distract from the screen. The menu system is stripped down to its bare essentials, and its four buttons slung underneath the screen conform to the standard logic of Menu (to select items), Back to go back and two arrow keys to navigate.

As well as brightness and contrast controls, you get a choice of Eco modes that dim the backlight by different amounts, plus a set of i-Style Color presets and ACR, a form of dynamic contrast. The latter is subtle (we didn’t notice any dramatic shifts in brightness), but it disables the other controls and didn’t seem to add much to image quality, so we left it disabled.

The presets are generally awful. The Text and Internet presets dim the image too much, while Game, Movie and Sports seem to halve the screen’s contrast, so we can’t recommend any of them. You also get colour controls in the form of Gamma and Colour Temperature. Gamma 3 is totally washed out, and we suspect this is used in the last three presets mentioned above. We found Gamma 2 added a bit of extra contrast.

Colour temperature is limited to a choice of Warm, Normal, Cool, User and sRGB. We ran our calibration software with the XB2374HDS set to the sRGB setting so that most other controls are disabled, and it reported a 91% match with the sRGB standard, with poor blue and green results. We opted for the User option in the end, and tweaked the blue and green channels manually to counter the monitor’s natural bias.

Despite these niggles, image quality was generally excellent. In Casino Royale, the rich colours and warm flesh tones stood out, having strong contrast in the dark scenes, being most apparent in the glistening sweat on Bond’s face when he’s been poisoned. There’s slightly less contrast than the best IPS panels we’ve seen, however.

It’s worth reminding the reader that colour accuracy, viewing angles and contrast are all vastly superior to the TN panel you’re likely to have in front of you. It just isn’t as good as some of its rivals. It has some disadvantages, too. In Crysis, we noticed slightly more ghosting when strafing past high-contrast edges, such as trees, but this is partly due to the higher response time of IPS panels. The improved contrast and richer colours more than made up for this, however.

If you’re still using a TN panel, there’s never been a better time to switch up, but the XB2374HDS isn’t the best value IPS panel available – that honour goes to the Viewsonic VX2336S-LED. If you need an HDMI port or an adjustable stand, though, then the XB2374HDS is a good alternative.