Iiyama Prolite X2377HDS review

The Iiyama Prolite X2377HDS won’t win any awards for design, but this 23in budget monitor ticks all the right boxes if you’re looking for an affordable IPS panel with a Full HD (1,920×1,080) display.

Its fixed, plain matt stand doesn’t offer much screen tilt, but it is compatible with VESA wall mounts, giving it a little bit more flexibility. Unfortunately, we found its vertical and horizontal viewing angles to be somewhat restrictive for an IPS panel, and the screen darkened quickly unless we were looking at it more or less straight on. We were pretty disappointed by this, as we normally expect to get much closer to the standard 178 degrees before we see any decrease in screen brightness.

Thankfully, the X2377HDS redeemed itself in our image quality tests, as our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 97.7% of the sRGB colour gamut straight before calibration. We couldn’t increase this figure after full calibration, but this is still a highly respectable score for a monitor under £140.

Here’s the pre-calibration colour gamut … … that we couldn’t notably improve upon

Our subjective image tests bore similar results, and our solid colour photos were both bright and vivid. There was, however, a noticeable shadow extending all the way around the edge of the screen, and this had a knock-on effect on the overall uniformity of our reds, blues, greens and whites. However, you’d have to strain your eyes to notice this on a day-to-day basis, and it certainly didn’t bother us while looking at emails or typing up MS Word documents.

Our high contrast image tests, on the other hand, showed the X2377HDS had excellent contrast levels. Our test photo of a sunlit hut by a beach showed plenty of detail in each area of the picture, and the monitor’s matt finish meant we had no problem at all with reflections.

Adjusting the brightness and individual RGB values is very simple too, as the X2377HDS has four buttons on the underside of the bezel that are all very simple to use. The monitor also has an Over Drive option, which is meant to reduce the blurriness of particularly fast graphics, but we couldn’t detect any discernible difference when watching films or playing games.

The Prolite X2377HDS has built-in 1.5W speakers, and it has a 3.5mm audio input to which you can attach devices. Sadly, the sound produced by the speakers was pretty mediocre. The volume levels were impressive, but everything except Windows jingles sounded like it was underwater.

In addition to the 3.5mm audio input, it has a VGA input and HDMI and DVI-D inputs that support HDCP, which means you can view copy-protected content output from your PC or games console. However, these are all concealed behind a big plastic lip on the back of the monitor, which makes them quite fiddly to access. Screwing in the DVI-D cable was particularly challenging unless we turned the monitor upside down.

Despite some annoyances, such as the location of the inputs and the limited viewing angles, the Iiyama Prolite X2377HDS is still a great monitor. It may not have the best viewing angles for an IPS screen, but it’s so well priced that any minor niggles are quite easy to forgive.