Asus VW266H review

The Asus VW266H is a 26in screen with a 1,920x1,200 resolution, which will play Full HD (1,920x1,080) video in all its glory with room to spare. The extra vertical room is useful for reading web pages and long documents. Unusually for a PC monitor it has a component video input, as well as VGA, DVI-D and HDMI inputs. There are also stereo phono audio inputs and a coaxial S/PDIF output.

Asus claims that the digital output offers customers the option of routing audio through an AV amplifier, "if for example they want to utilise their monitor as part of a home theatre solution, such as in a bedroom or somewhere where space is limited for a large TV". However, we don't see it being a great advantage, as most people will take the audio output from their PC rather than routing it to the monitor first, via HDMI.

The menu system is reasonably clear, although by default a lot of options are greyed out and almost impossible to see due to the white text on a light grey background. The first screen includes a number of preset modes, and you can access advanced options, such as saturation, skin tone adjustment and dynamic contrast only if you choose a preset other than Standard. While each of the presets can be fine-tuned, we found that Standard mode had the most natural and realistic colours.

Indivudial colours can be tweaked although by default they are set to 100, which makes everything look over-saturated. The Standard setting left a blue cast in images, so we set red and green to 80 and blue to 65, which produced a more balanced tone. The VW266H doesn't have LED backlighting, and was neither as bright as LED displays we've seen recently, nor as evenly lit.

A panel at the rear of the case detaches to reveal VESA mounting points for wall mounting, but you'll need to a sturdy mount as the VW266H is very heavy. The round base has an etched design that will collect dust over time, while the glossy black bezel and the silver stripe underneath the screen look a bit dated.

The inclusion of component video input could be useful to some, but given that the VW266H's image quality isn't as good as Iiyama's ProLite E2710HDSD-1, which is larger and cheaper, we can't recommend it.