NEC EA241WM review

NEC's EA241WM may seem extraordinarily expensive for a 24in monitor, even if it does have a fully adjustable stand. However, you're paying for exceptional image quality.

Everything about this screen screams quality, and we couldn't find anything bad to say about it. The bright, pure whites were incredible and made other displays look dingy.

Flesh tones were perfect, making people in images and movies look natural and lifelike. Colour accuracy was also perfect on the whole, and our test images and movies looked absolutely stunning.

There are five preset picture modes, accessed through the onscreen menu and joystick, but we found that they didn't do much for picture quality. We preferred to customise the image ourselves.

While most 24in displays have a full HD resolution of 1,920x1,080, the EA241WM's is 1,920x1,200. This provides a little more vertical room, although it also means slightly larger black bars when you're watching movies. For computer use, though, the extra height provides a larger workspace and makes dealing with large documents or spreadsheets easier.

Work is really what this monitor is designed for, particularly with its adjustable stand. This lets you adjust the height of the screen by 110cm and pivot it from landscape to portrait mode. There's no software to adjust your desktop automatically, but this is easy to do in your graphics card's driver. The stand also contains a four-port USB hub and has a handy headphone port on the side.

There's no HDMI input, although the DVI input is HDCP compliant, so you could connect a Blu-ray player or games console using an adaptor if necessary.

There's no getting away from the fact that the EA241WM is expensive, especially when decent 24in screens can be bought for less than half the price. That said, if you want the ultimate in image quality, a fully adjustable stand and a higher resolution, this display is worth every penny.