Iiyama ProLite X436S review

Whether you care about the environment or not, leaving your monitor on full power and brightness uses electricity, which costs you money. Switching it off or using the power-saving mode can save you a little .

Iiyama's ProLite X436S goes one step further. First, it has an infrared motion sensor in the front of the bezel. If nobody is sitting in front of the screen it goes into power-saving mode, automatically turning back on when you return. Second, it has a light sensor, so it can dynamically adjust the monitor's brightness according to the ambient light - lower brightness for dark rooms; higher brightness for light rooms. Both settings are turned off by default and the slightly fiddly onscreen display (OSD) makes it a little tricky to find them, but once you do they work really well.

There's a choice of digital or analogue inputs. Disappointingly, Iiyama only provides an analogue cable, so you'll have to pay around £20 extra if you want to use digital. We recommend this, though, as a digital connection increases the picture quality.

In general, image quality is very good. Our colour wheel test showed a decent range of colours, with excellent gradation between shades. Our greyscale tests, which are typically hard for a monitor to cope with, also came out well, with smooth gradation across the whole range. However, vertical viewing angles aren't brilliant and we found that we had to be sitting directly in front of the screen to see an even distribution of light.

With its 8ms response time, the X436S is one of the fastest monitors on the market and we didn't notice any image blurring on fast-moving images such as games. The monitor also comes with a set of 2W speakers, but they're awful and distort on the lowest volume. As you have to use the OSD to change volume, they're not very practical either.

The thoughtful and innovative power-saving functions work really well, but vertical viewing angles and poor accessories let this package down.

Author: David Ludlow