Iiyama Prolite XB2485WSU review

The Iiyama Prolite XB2485WSU is a height-adjustable IPS monitor with a 1,900×1,200 resolution, and you can also rotate it to use in portrait mode. It has a slightly squarer 16:10 aspect ratio than most other monitors to accommodate its larger resolution, but while the extra pixels brought a welcome boost to desktop space, this monitor wasn’t without its problems.

From the outside, the XB2485WSU did little to win us over. Its chunky, plastic stand and thick, matt black bezel aren’t particularly attractive, and we couldn’t rotate it into Portrait mode without first tilting the screen outward, as the base of the stand gets in the way even at the screen’s tallest elevation. We also kept knocking the corner of the screen on the base when returning it to its usual landscape mode and this quickly started leaving some quite noticeable scratches on the plastic stand, raising concerns about its overall build quality.

The monitor’s colour accuracy was below average for an IPS panel as well. Straight out of the box, it was only showing 92.4% of the sRGB colour gamut, with very low blue coverage and slightly low coverage of the red spectrum. We’d expect this kind of score from a monitor with the cheaper TN panel technology, but IPS screens should be scoring nearer 96%. We managed to increase colour accuracy to 93.5% after calibration, but this is still a poor result for an IPS screen.

Further testing showed some more positive results. We recorded good black levels of 0.32cd/m² and a high contrast ratio of 1090:1 prior to calibration, and we felt the benefit of this in our subjective image tests. Whites were a little grey, but blacks were deep and we saw rich colours and lots of detail in our high contrast test images. Solid blocks of red, green and blue were also bright, vivid and uniformly lit across the screen.

The screen has an impressively wide range of inputs. There’s no HDMI, sadly, but the screen has VGA, DVI and DisplayPort inputs, a four-port USB hub, a 3.5mm audio line in and a headphone jack. It also has two 1.5W speakers, but these aren’t really suitable for anything more than Windows sounds.

Ultimately, the Prolite XB2485WSU’s larger resolution is the only edge it has against other monitors with similarly-adjustable stands. We’d recommend the award-winning BenQ BL2410PT instead, as it’s not only significantly cheaper, but it also has much better image quality, a wider range of ports and a more robust-feeling stand.