Viewsonic VX2739wm review

The Viewsonic VX2739wm is a monster monitor, with a thick, square bezel and a massive stand that requires four bolts to hold it in place. It's surprisingly well balanced, so it's easy to adjust the tilt despite it being one of the largest monitors we've seen in ages.

With a CCFL backlight, we expected it to do poorly against the newer LED models, but in fact the VX2739wm's backlight proved brighter than on many newer LED monitors. However, this brightness can also affect how colours are displayed, over-saturating large areas of bright colour. A bright backlight also means more light bleeds through, so blacks weren't as deep as others here. The alternative is to turn down the backlight, although shadow areas lose detail.

The menu system is controlled by four physical buttons on the bottom left side of the screen. These use a standard system, with Menu, Select and navigation buttons, and the menu itself is fairly clear. Image controls are fairly basic: as well as brightness and contrast, you can set colour temperature to one of four standard Kelvin values, choose RGB values individually via the User option, or choose sRGB. However, the latter not only disables the other controls, but reduces brightness drastically.

You have a choice of VGA, DVI or HDMI inputs, so you can connect multiple devices to this display, such as your PC and a Blu-ray player. There's also a 3.5mm audio input for connecting a device to the monitor's internal speakers. These sound clear but lack volume, despite the SRS branding, so they're only really suitable for Windows sounds.

In a small panel on the right side of the screen you'll find a headphone socket, which is handy and means you don't have to reach around the back of your PC when you want to listen to something privately, plus two of the four USB ports. Two more USB ports, plus the USB input, are located with the video inputs on the rear.

When it comes down to choosing between the VX2739wm and the Iiyama ProLite E2710HDSD-1, it's a hard call: both have similar panels, and both cost about the same. We preferred the E2710HDSD's design and slightly more vibrant colours.