Asus VE228 21.5″ LED 1080p Monitor Review

When it comes to testing a screen, there are a number of individual factors that every person looks for, I personally look for a crisp bright image, with a real depth of colour (in other words, vibrant reds greens & blues and deep blacks) that doesn’t look washed out when used in a bright environment. At the same time I look for a screen that works not only in a working environment (the environment that my screens spend most of their time) but also for watching movies and gaming.

Testing the working environment is an easy one to start with, by swapping it out for my standard LG LCD and using this for a number of days to see how it feels to work with over an extended period. I’ve found with some screens on the past that they are ok to work with for an hour or so, but any longer and they feel like they are glaring too much. For movie watching, to cover a number of bases with colour vibrant images and fast action scenes I chose a couple of contrasting high definition films, namely Toy Story 3 with its bright crisp colours and Crank: High Voltage with its fast action scenes for the screens refresh rate. Last of all and the bit that I rarely get around to doing was a bit of game play. The game of choice just recently has been Metro 2033 and with its dark scenes, is a good test to see how the black reproduction comes out during use.

Going back through the same notion of testing, day to day use of the VE228H was very relaxing, and during long use I didn’t get the feeling of eye strain or tiredness which is a key thing with any screen as even with a poorer quality of screen, the refresh rates and eye strain can lead to headaches and therefore a lesser pleasing experience. The screen as it claims in its spec list is nice and bright even during the day making everything easier to see

Moving onto the movies and gaming, I’ll first point out the audio from the screen, whilst the speakers are ok for windows system sound and the odd bit of light music, but anything more i.e. when watching a film or playing games then you’re better off in doing what I did and switch over to a proper set of speakers. Back to the images, which is the key part after all, Toy Story 3 looked fantastic on the screen with a consistently crisp and colourful image with a real sense of depth and vibrance and Crank: High Voltage was a similar experience with the fast action scenes not blurred by the 60Hz refresh rate.  Playing Metro 2033 I found was more enjoyable when switching through the screens SPLENDID feature and selecting the Gaming mode option which enhances the contrast and colour tones of the image to still give a nice depth to the blacks, but not without enhancing the darker tones in such a way that you’re looking at a dark image, unable to make shapes and objects out clearly.