I’ve been waiting a long time to replace my aging, yet faithful Compaq 17″ LCD monitor for the last 6 years with some high-definition, widescreen goodness, but have always balked at the price of any display 24″ and higher. For a long time, these were the only displays that offered true high-definition at 1920×1200, but now Benq have released a 22″ display that does full high-definition for less than AUD$300! It was too tempting – I had to get one!

So there I was, at the Atomic Live 2008 event at Sydney’s Olympic Park in Homebush, and AusPC Market were selling two versions of these displays at a price of $240 for the T2200 and $250 for the E2200 – the only real differences being refresh rate (2ms on E-series vs 5ms on T-series) and an HDMI port on the E-series. As soon as I saw them, I instantly dismissed them as typical low-cost 22″ displays no higher than 1440×900 resolution, but as the day went on, I observed that there seemed to be a helluva lot of picture information on-screen, and it looked crisp too. After asking a few questions and quickly getting on-line myself (on my EeePC via my Nokia N95) to review the model specification on Benq’s website, I suddenly discovered that this was no cheapo 22″ display – it was a new range of monitors from Benq that offer the full native high-definition resolution of 1920×1080 (as opposed to 1920×1200) for a sub-$300 price! I couldn’t believe it! Best of all was the price $240 ($270 RRP) for the T-series and $250 ($280 RRP) for the E-series.

Benq E2200HD Widescreen monitor	Benq T2200HD Widescreen monitor

I grabbed two E-series models for myself. Bargain.

The specification is pretty good – The E-series features a widescreen 1920×1080 native pixel resolution, 2ms grey-to-grey, inbuilt stereo speakers, plastic snap-on stand with tilt adjustment (but no height or rotate adjustment, however it feels pretty sturdy), On-Screen-Display (OSD) functions, a single HDMI, DVI (single-link) and VGA input, a headphone output, and no USB ports (though the bezel design is identical to the USB model, except where there should be USB ports is just a blank face). The monitor has a piano-black gloss finish (which is naturally prone to fingerprints) with matte silver trim and highlights, there are four buttons down the right edge of the bezel for screen and volume controls and a flush power button with orange and green illumination for standby and on modes respectively. All buttons have a responsive, but soft click action to them. At the back, there is a clip-on cable tidy that is large enough to accomodate the VGA, DVI, HDMI and power leads simultaneously. There are also four VESA-standard screw holes on the back panel to allow you to fit an aftermarket monitor stand, which would also permit you to mount the monitor vertically if you required it, as the provided stand does not allow screen rotation.

The T-series is pretty much identical other than the fact it has 5ms response time and no HDMI input, plus a slightly different bezel design.

So, how do they look under Ubuntu Linux? Two words? Bloody fantastic.

The E-series monitors come with a single-link DVI-D and VGA cable in the box (no HDMI cable). I connected both monitors to my NVidia GeForce 8800GT PCI-E graphics card DVI outputs using the provided cables and powered up.

Ubuntu Hardy booted up with one screen on and one screen off (as expected at this point). I noted a small degree of light bleed at the top and bottom of the panel when the screen was completely black, but it wasn’t intrusive. A quick dip into the screenmode preferences app showed that Ubuntu immediately recognised the resolution of the monitors as 1920×1080, though the screen mode was still in 1280×1024 from my 17″ settings, so the picture looked horizontally stretched. I changed the screenmode to 1920×1080 and the native screen mode instantly popped into place.

It was at this point that the extra screen real-estate became very apparent. All the icons I had dotted on the right-side of the screen now had vast expanses of space next to them – a good 700 pixels worth. Vertically the difference was less pronounced at an extra 60-odd pixels, but you could still see space.

I had already previously installed the NVidia settings application, so I fired it up and found that both monitors were recognised by the system. I activated the second monitor by enabling “TwinView” and restarted X. The second monitor came to life, but was still black while the first monitor showed the GDM login. After logging in, the picture on the second monitor suddenly appeared. My wallpaper had been drastically zoomed in (not stretched) to fit both screens, but everything else looked fine. The menu panels restricted themselves to the first monitor and the second was completely bare bar the wallpaper. A test drag of icons and windows to the right monitor worked perfectly.

First thing was first, fix that wallpaper. I have a small collection of dual-screen wallpapers and stuck one on – now that looks cool.

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Man, the freedom having a second display gives you is uncanny. I use two 22″ Dell displays at work and every time I’d come home I’d feel so cramped on the single 17″ display. My work displays are only 1680×1050 each, however, and while you wouldn’t think it, 1920×1080 really IS a lot more screen real-estate than 1650×1050, let alone the 1280×1024, and with the two displays, I now have 3840×1080 at my disposal – mmmm.

Compiz operated as expected and I did not observe any slowdown in any animations including full-screen animations like Expo and Desktop Cube, however the desktop cube did not work as expected. I use the typical four workspaces and instead of a four-sided cube, each screen is treated separately, but joined together and you get this 8-sided polygon rendered to both displays, offset from each other by one side. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to correct this with the various tweaks I tried, but I’ll look at this in more detail later as I didn’t have time to do more research.

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EDIT – 21st December 2008: I should point out that the version of Compiz Fusion included with Ubuntu Intrepid has fixed the above problem. You can now elect to have a giant cube fill both screens, or in my case now, a giant cylinder (which optionally can be rendered as two cylinders on each screen as well like the above pic).

Cylinder:

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Cube:

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Expo, as always, looks the biz, and is probably genuinely useful now with the extra resolution to properly be able to see things on each workspace.

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The next thing I tried were games like Nexius, Warsow, OpenArena and so forth. The low-resolution softness of the textures was very apparent, however I also observed other issues, such as Nexius with its hard-coded list of screenmodes – I couldn’t actually select 1920×1080 – only 1680×1050 and 1920×1200, and it also refused to switch to full-screen too. OpenArena only ever saw a screen of 3840×1080 and instead of rendering it that large, it just centered a single-screen-sized 4:3 version smack bang between the two screens with the rest of the display black. I was no able to select other modes in the graphcis options – it was stuck at one size only. Half-Life 2 running via Wine was a bit problematic as well – it too only saw a single screenmode of 3840×1080 and only rendered to the first screen and not the second.

I tried some smaller games too, not that I expected anything special from them – Pingus is fixed resolution and looked somewhat tiny, Frozen-Bubble is also fixed resolution, but refused to go full-screen, preferring to stay as a window, and a remake of the C64 classic Wizball (see above screenshot) doesn’t have the option to go full-screen either or change res, but you can see is dwarfed by the enormity of the display’s resolution.

I keep a dual-boot installation of Windows in order to play some of my favourite games until true Linux ports of them appear, so I rebooted into Windows to see how some more modern games would look. First up, my all-time favourite Half-Life 2. HL2 Episode 2 frankly looked bloody gorgeous. I wasn’t able to get the game running across both monitors, but at 1920×1080 with all graphics options to their highest settings plus 4xAA, I almost swore I could step into that screen. This is a marked improvement over my 17″ bar none. Again, the left & right visibility made the game feel that much more immersive and more comfortable to play, and the high texture resolution really shows up well. Bioshock also looked equally gobsmacking. This was definitely a game designed for widescreen. My Geforce 8800GT rendered both games happily at a smooth framerate without breaking a sweat.

Trackmania Forever was a game that was more than happy to switch to a dual-screen mode, though it was a bit awkward to play given the focus of your driving ends up being where the two monitors meet in the middle (you really need three monitors for this). What was interesting to watch was the enhanced super-wide play environment, were you had so much visibility left & right of you. It really added a lot, especially the opening preview sequence of the track before you begin your race. If I were a more active gameplayer, I’d probably go out and buy a third monitor right now, but I do more programming and web surfing than games nowadays, so I won’t.

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Back into Ubuntu now and it’s time for one of the biggest tests – High Definition VIDEO. I watch TV using MythTV streamed from a Mythbuntu server, and have long gotten used to the black bars presented by shrinking a 16:9 broadcast into a 4:3 display. When I fired up Myth, I was presented with my selected Retro theme looking decidedly out of place on the screen. Time to change it to a widescreen theme! The widescreen version of Blootube works a treat and is so much more readable when there’s extra screen real-estate available!

I picked a pre-recorded high-definition broadcast and sat in awe. Holy cow, the image detail! I was always aware that I wasn’t watching true high-definition on my 17″ being scaled down and all, but it was always notably sharper than a standard-definition broadcast, but looking at the same stream on a true high-definition display was certainly drool-worthy. Here was a level of crispness I have not enjoyed outside of a computer game. The colours were crisp and dynamic, the 2ms response time was clearly evident in the very visible lack of blur in fast-moving scenes that my 12ms Compaq 17″ was prone to, and did I mention the image crispness? No fuzzy edges, no interpolation, this was true high-definition. No more black bars either! I was in heaven. The same was equally said of some high-definition 1080p PlayStation3 trailers I had handy. The only thing I have to get used to now is watching my TV and video on the side of my desk instead of the centre of it. I found that switching the video to the other monitor occasionally helped to offset any awkwardness. It’s also fun watching TV whilst playing a game or surfing the ‘net on the other monitor at the same time too.

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Now what about the other end of the scale? Traditionally low-resolution video and games look horrid on high-definition displays. How would these monitors go? I fired up a DivX’ed SDTV recording of Doctor Who Series Two and was pleasantly surprised. The low pixel resolution and bitrate of the video already showed up some minor compression artifacts on my 17″ before, but on the large Benq display it didn’t seem to be any worse. In fact, it seemed to be better, presumably because the higher 2ms refresh rate reduced overall motion blur and thus made the artifacts more tolerable!

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The image scaler on the Benq is impressive. Low-res games run at full-screen such as MAME arcade emulation looked perfectly fine. I could not fault the image presented to me and the anti-aliasing of the image did not look overly soft or distracting. In a similar vein, full-screen text terminals look perfectly readable and sharp, and the 1920×1080 resolution makes viewing Apache logs in an X terminal session soooo much easier!

About this time I had a break for dinner. Whilst away, the screensaver kicked in and interestingly I observed that it rendered two separate screensavers to both displays instead of one giant one, and the two screensavers were not simply clones of each other either – they were animating completely autonomously of each other. The unlock login box appears on whichever monitor had the last window focus. (The blue line in the middle of the screenshot below is the application window shadow. Mine is set to blue instead of the usual black).

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Input testing: As already mentioned, my Ubuntu desktop is connected via DVI, but the monitor also features VGA and HDMI inputs.

DVI as always, looks great. Colours were strong and vivid. This is a pretty good TN panel.

VGA was equally impressive, again the image scaler smoothly scaling low-resolution text-only displays nicely and the auto-screen adjustment does an admirable job of centering and adjusting the image size. I could see no image noise either.

I was unable to test the HDMI input due to, well… not having any HDMI equipment, including PS3. I’ll get one eventually, though…

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EDIT – 27th February 2009: I finally got my own PlayStation3! Hooked it up to my E2200HD straight away with an HDMI cable and positvely drooled. The PS3 automatically detected a full 1080p display and the monitor had absolutely no quibbles displaying everything with a rock-solid image. No stripes, no fuzzy bits, not image shake. Dead-set rock solid. The E2200HD seamless switched between 576p, 720p and 1080i/p modes with no visible image jump like most TV’s do. On occasion, the display would be a few seconds late displaying a synced 1080p image (such as when restarting the console or toggling inputs) and on two occasions displayed a horizontally double-stretched opening PS3 sequence, but restarting the console, or toggling the monitor to DVI and then back to HDMI fixed that. Playback of Blu-ray movies at true 24fps is something to behold – not a single frame skip, and 60fps visuals such as that from WipEout HD look awe-inspiring. Colours remained sharp and vibrant, edges looked crisp and anti-aliased edges looked perfect. Fast (racing) games looked great with no obvious blurring except for what the game itself provided (there is some SLIGHT blur with slow-panning game scenese, but you have to be looking for it really), and platform games looked strong and colourful. Nothing was overscanned, nothing was off-centre – it all came together perfectly. Also, the monitor’s OSD only appears when you first enter HDMI mode and when you switch off the PS3 to advise of no signal – outside of that, changing modes from 1080p to 720p does not cause the OSD to appear. One minor annoyance was that when the HDMI signal was lost when the PS3 was switched off, I had to wait for the OSD message advising of no signal on HDMI to disappear before I could switch it back to DVI for my PC (I later discovered I don’t need to manually change it – it will move to the next available signal automatically after a few seconds). I also observed that the monitor does not break connection on the DVI port whilse in HDMI mode. Restarting Ubuntu still has it automatically detecting and setting the monitor even though it was in HDMI mode displaying an active image from the PS3.

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The HDMI cable I used was a Belkin cable that appears to have a slightly longer-than-usual HDMI connector body. I found that there was almost not enough room to plug in the HDMI lead into the monitor and I was a bit worried I was going to bend something, however once connected everything is fine, though I won’t be disconnecting and reconnecting that HDMI cable again anytime soon for fear of bending the cable or damaging the HDMI connector on the monitor – it’s more or less got a permanent home there now!

The HDMI passed through the PS3′s audio to the E2200HD’s speakers without issue, though I quickly changed the PS3′s config to output the audio over the standard RCA’s for my PC’s sound system instead of the HDMI cable – the E2200HD’s speakers have absolutely no bass to them whatsoever.

All up, I have to give a very big thumbs up to the HDMI implemented here on this monitor. It works, and it works brilliantly.

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The on-board stereo speakers are typical of any monitor speaker these days – lacking oomph. In fact, I daresay they’ve never heard of the term, so I’ll use the technical term and say they’re crap. There is a complete lack of bass and while the higher end of the frequency range actually comes through quite clearly without distortion, cranking the volume all the way up to 100 isn’t very awe-inspiring. You could liken it to being able to listen to someone else’s headphones whilst on the train. Needless to say, I switched back to my external sound system fairly quickly.

There are actually two audio inputs – one for the PC stereo jack and one for HDMI. By default the monitor auto-selects where audio is coming and plays it accordingly, of you can manually switch using the OSD controls.

The OSD controls feature the usual gamut of settings such as preset image types, input selection, general image controls such as contrast, brightness, and horizontal and vertical size. The monitor can also tell you what the current input resolution is as well as the refresh rate. The only real annoyance I had with the OSD is the two second delay between pressing the input toggle switch and the screen actually changing to that input, for example, when changing from the DVI input to VGA input.

Conclusion: There’s really nothing truely bad that I can say about this display, mostly because of the price. It’s been a long time coming, but we finally have sub-AUD$300 high-definition PC monitors! While I’d have preferred to get a 24″ (or let’s be honest, a 30″), the price is still high on these displays and at the end of the day, 22″ is still a pretty big monitor and makes 1920×1080 more than readable. It would have been nice to have an SD-card reader or USB ports, but this isn’t enough to detract from the value of these displays. The speakers, well… you don’t buy a monitor for its speakers now, do you?

Review score: 9 out of 10

EDIT: After reading some concerns about motion blur from people on other forums, here’s my 2c about it: I have no idea what they are talking about. I find this monitor to be sharp and crisp with absolutely no input lag or motion blur. If I move my mouse slowly, I can see some ever-so-slight ghosting from black to white, typical of any LCD, but moving quickly it looks fine. When I animate my desktop, I do not see any obvious blur, and even moving the cube (or cylinder now) quickly, I can still easily read text on it – it does not look blurred to me. If I play full-screen 1080p high-definition movies, I cannot see any blur other than what the movie uses itself. Now if I go and play a game like FarCry2 or Bioshock, you see blur there, but that’s because the game uses blur as a FEATURE – that’s not the monitor doing that. If I compare my Benq displays against my old Compaq 12ms unit, yes, I can see an obvious difference between the two in refresh speed, but other than that, I think people are getting just a little too picky! Comments on the issue are welcome!