BenQ FP202W review

The BenQ's subdued dark blue exterior clearly doesn't wish to distract from its whopping 20in widescreen display.

Apart from a sticker on the FP202W's corner proclaiming its nippy 8ms response time, there really isn't much else to draw to your attention.

We were soon wondering where all the menu buttons had got to, until we found them located inconveniently along the monitor's side. Although placing the buttons out of sight looks nice and neat, we were unimpressed with having to constantly peer around the side of the BenQ to see what buttons we were pressing.

Minor niggles aside, the BenQ proved fairly unremarkable. It's a 20in widescreen TFT monitor and thus perfect for watching DVD movies without huge black bars at the top and bottom. The generous native resolution of 1680 x 1050 makes it easy to work with several applications or documents at the same time. The obligatory DVI and D-Sub inputs are easily accessible at its rear, too.

The BenQ has four display modes: Photo; Movie 1; Movie 2 and Standard mode, which are designed to coax the best picture quality possible from the BenQ's 20in panel. In truth Movie 1, Movie 2 and Photo mode just added a reddish tinge to the picture, and we didn't notice any dramatic improvement in image quality.

Despite its brightness, we weren't that impressed by the BenQ's image quality, especially when compared to Belinea's superb 10 20 35W. Regardless of how much we tweaked the colour, brightness or contrast settings, the FP202W suffered from a slightly blue- green tint. It also had a few problems resolving really dark greys and very light shades of colour. Things only got worse when we tested the BenQ with games and movies. Despite the claimed 8ms response time, it just didn't cope as well as the Belinea. When faced with the fast moving sequences in our test DVD Sin City, there was noticeable ghosting and motion wasn't anywhere near as smooth as its competitor. Viewing angles were a little narrow in comparison too.

The BenQ FP202W isn't a bad monitor, but it's comprehensively outperformed by the Belinea , which only costs a fiver more.