Huawei MateView SE 24in review: A brilliant budget monitor with pivot

Our favourite budget monitor here at Expert Reviews is the 27in Acer K273. For £160 it’s an awful lot of monitor for the money, with a 75Hz FullHD panel, support for AMD’s FreeSync and decent gamut coverage. Of course, it’s not perfect. The only inputs are HDMI and VGA, meaning there’s no DisplayPort option, and it’s not the most colour-accurate screen you’ll ever stumble across.

Huawei has now released a challenger to Acer, the MateView SE. Buy it directly from Huawei and the SE will set you back £180, which gives the Acer a price advantage – but at the time of writing you can pick it up from Amazon for £150. And that’s for the Adjustable Stand version, which can be rotated from landscape to portrait. The Standard version without the trick stand is only £130.

Huawei MateView SE 24in review: What do you get for the money?

The MateView SE consists of a 23.8in IPS panel with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, a refresh rate of 75Hz and AMD FreeSync support. It also has a trick up its metaphorical sleeve, which is that you can rotate the screen clockwise through 90 degrees from landscape to portrait. That makes it especially useful if you want to use it as a second display to read documents or for anything that lends itself to being displayed up rather than across. The observant among you will have noticed that the MateView SE is smaller than the K273, but both have 1,920 x 1,080 panels so you need to ask yourself whether you prefer 27in at 81.6dpi or 23.8in at 92.5dpi. Personally, I’ll always take sharpness before size.

On the rear of the MateView SE, you’ll find one HDMI 1.4 port and one DisplayPort 1.4 port for video input. And that’s it apart from the proprietary power jack. The stand offers 18 degrees of backward tilt and 5˚ forward and has 110mm of vertical adjustment. As is increasingly common these days, the quick-release stand attachment covers a 100mm² VESA mount should you wish to attach the SE to a wall or desk arm. In the box, you’ll find an HDMI cable and a power supply but no DisplayPort cable, which I would have preferred given that it’s 2023. 

Physically, the SE is a nicely put-together device, especially given the price. The bezels surrounding the display are impressively narrow at 6mm on the top and at the sides, while the chin below the panel is 12mm deep. Huawei claims a 92% screen-to-body ratio and 178-degree viewing angles, neither of which are claims I will argue with. At 175mm square, the base of the stand is large enough to keep everything stable but small enough to not rob space from even a small desk. And at 4.5kg all-in, it isn’t inordinately heavy. The clockwise rotation is an easy manoeuvre to make single-handedly; just remember to have the display at its maximum elevation before you try to spin it.

Unusually for a bargain display, the MateView has TÜV Rheinland low blue light and flicker-free certifications and is also apparently the first display to be given the SGS low visual fatigue certification. All that means you should be able to stare at the MateView for hours on end without your eyeballs melting.

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Huawei MateView SE 24in review: What does it do well?

Pay around £100 for a monitor and as long as the images it renders don’t look like the mutant offspring of an Etch-A-Sketch and a kaleidoscope, you’re ahead of the deal. The MateView is significantly better than that. To start with there’s good gamut coverage, with 99.6% sRGB, 83.6% DCI-P3 and 73.9% AdobeRGB. That last is a tad narrow, but I’ve seen worse on much more expensive panels.

Delta E colour variation scored 1.47 vs the sRGB profile and 3.3 vs DCI-P3. The second is rather higher than I would have liked and is detectable to the trained eye but again, this is a budget monitor aimed at the general user rather than the professional and, taken as that, those are perfectly decent results.

Maximum brightness scored 272cd/m² and the contrast ratio came in at 1,020:1, which again I was more than happy with. Black luminescence was a lowly 0.26cd/m². Huawei doesn’t quote a G2G response time, but judging with the naked eye I would be surprised if it is massively far off the usual 5ms. For a budget display, the MateView SE is surprisingly uniform in performance. The contrast ratio is a little high in the top right corner and the maximum brightness a little low in the bottom left corner. Switching to average luminescence 24 of the 25 swatches showed green with only the centre-top swatch showing red with a 7.4% overage at 25% brightness. I don’t think you can ask for more at this sort of money.

Dig around in the menu and you’ll find a clutch of Game Assist settings. These include options to reduce response time from Standard to Fast or Super-Fast, and impressively neither setting resulted in excessive inverse ghosting. Add to that the 75Hz refresh, crosshairs (five styles, two colours, no less) and FreeSync and you have a pretty impressive range of hat-tips to the gaming fraternity.

The MateView SE’s menu system is managed via a single joystick located below the centre of the screen. It works much like – and just as well as – the similar system used by LG on most of its monitors. A press opens up a menu that lets you access the brightness, main menu and picture mode, as well as powering off or backing out of the current selection. Two wholly unexpected features at this price are the facility to alter the transparency of the OSD menu and pop a frame rate display in either the top left or top right corners of the screen, though oddly you can’t have a crosshair and a frame rate counter simultaneously.

Picture mode lets you choose between DCI-P3, sRGB, HDR colour, Game, eBook and Custom. Like all HDR modes on displays lacking anything in the way of area dimming it’s best avoided, but the eBook mode was very nicely calibrated.

Huawei MateView SE 24in review: What could be better?

Huawei’s decision not to fit the MateView with anything in the way of audio – there’s no 3.5mm audio jack, let alone any speakers – is objectively a drawback, although I don’t feel too bothered. Ultimately, loudspeakers in any monitor costing less than £500 tend to be utterly useless so I’m quite happy that Huawei has taken the decision to reduce size and cost by not fitting something I’d ever use. Not when £70 will get you a top-notch set of stereo desktop speakers such as our Best Buy Creative T60, which come with more volume, sound quality and features than the built-in system in a monitor costing ten times as much as the MateView SE.

The minimal number of I/O ports is perhaps a little harder to forgive. DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 1.4 inputs are all you get and, even at this price, it would have been nice if Huawei could have at least stretched to a Type-C connector to more easily facilitate MHL Alt Mode connectivity from mobile devices. An industry-standard power cable would have been preferable, too.

The MateView doesn’t carry any sort of HDR certification. The HDR colour setting is supposed to simulate HDR video colour effects but it really doesn’t.

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Huawei MateView SE 24in review: Should you buy it?

For £130, absolutely you should. The MateView is a beautifully balanced monitor, and I’d say that even if the price was closer to £200. All the display basics are well evidenced and there’s a whole stack of handy little extras that come as genuine surprises at this price point, such as the 90-degree pivot and the enhancements squirrelled away in the Game Assist menu. Our previous king of budget monitors, the Acer K273, has size on its side but is still only a Full HD display and so has a lower pixel density. If you can live with 24 rather than 27 inches, then the MateView SE is our new budget champion.