Benq FP72E review

This month's LCD megatest covers just about every size of monitor from 19" upwards. If you're just after a budget 17" screen, though, perhaps for a cheaper PC, BenQ's FP72E could be what you need.

The black-and-silver design isn't going to win any style awards, but it's slim and looks neat and tidy. The bottom of the screen has a pair of 1W speakers built in, which are fine if you're just interested in hearing Windows' occasional bleeps. You can control the sound using the buttons on the front of the display; confusingly, though, you have to press the Enter key to bring up the volume display on the screen. The speakers don't do a very good job with games or music. You can use the headphone jack to plug in a pair of headphones without having to reach around the back of your PC, though.

At this price, you can't expect a stand with a lot of movement; like most budget monitors, the FP72E has only a tilt. Fortunately, there's a choice of D-sub and DVI inputs, so you can use it with any PC. The digital input gives a superior picture, so use this if you can.

Even when you're looking at budget products, quality should be important. The FP72E is bright, and the Windows desktop looked sharp at the monitor's native resolution of 1,280x1,024. Colours were vibrant and text was clearly defined. Horizontal viewing angles were very good; we had to view the screen from acute angles before we noticed any drop in brightness or colour accuracy. Vertical viewing angles weren't as good, and we noticed varying levels of brightness across the screen when sitting directly in front of it. This isn't as apparent in standard Windows applications, but showed up in our greyscale test, where the top left of the image faded into black. There was slight banding in this area, too.

Colour reproduction was much better and our colour test showed excellent gradation between shades and strong colours. The FP72E has an 8ms response time. Testing in Doom 3 showed this is more than enough to provide smooth games without ghosting. You can also watch movies without any problems.

The FP72E might not be the most exciting monitor, but it does a good job for those on a tight budget, costing less than 19" displays. Aside from the vertical viewing angles, image quality is great. If you can stretch your budget a bit further, though, try one of the 19" displays from our Labs test.