HKC 2219A review

The HKC 2219A monitor only recently started appearing with budget review PCs, and it’s easy to see why. Despite its low price, it has a Full HD 1,920×1,080 resolution and both DVI and VGA inputs. Unfortunately, the DVI input doesn’t support HDCP, so you can’t connect a Blu-ray player or other HDMI device to watch films.

The 2219A’s plain design won’t turn any heads: the glossy black plastic that makes up the bulk of the case and stand looks cheap, and with a fat bezel and a bulky stand, there’s little to please the eye. Buttons for the menu system are slung underneath the right side of the screen, but rather than looking minimalist, the simple letters and arrows that mark the buttons’ functions look crude.

The menu itself is no different. It uses basic colours and is reasonably easy to read, but you’re limited to basic brightness, contrast and colour settings. Colour warmth can be set to Warm, Cool or User-defined, and no matter how we tried to balance the colours, we couldn’t make them look natural. There’s a blue cast that’s hard to get rid of, and it’s not helped by the poor backlight.

In our white screen test, the 2219A fared poorly, especially when compared to newer LED-backlit screens. It didn’t help that the basic brightness control (which does little but turn up the light) was turned down to 80 per cent by default, but even this shouldn’t have had such a drastic effect. We also found the colour temperature set to Cool after a factory reset, and turning up the red component a bit helped to even things out.

Overall, image quality wasn’t as bad as we’d feared at first, and with a proper calibration tool you may be able to get a satisfactory picture. However, the poor backlight limits the contrast and overall brightness, and the controls aren’t flexible enough to let you quickly switch between settings for different tasks, such as watching films or reading text.

At under £100 the HKC 2219A may look tempting, but there are better monitors available. The AOC F22+ has better control over image quality, while the Iiyama ProLite E2208HDD has a warmer and more natural image, plus it supports HDCP.