Asus VH242H 23.6" Widescreen LCD Monitor
Test patterns like those offered by Everest can be extremely useful for gauging a monitor's ability and also for calibration purposes. This is especially useful to people who need their monitor to be perfectly calibrated for work with publishing and photography. However, most people don't purchase a monitor exclusively for "work" so we'll look at some real-world tests with high definition video content and high-resolution games next, to give you and idea of how well the monitor stands up to "play".
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HD Movie Playback: We watched a number of DVDs and HD video clips to see how the VH242H handles video playback. Even at the factory defaults in Standard Mode, the display did a very good job at movie playback. Colors were rich, motion was smooth, and the blacks were dark. Switching over to Theater Mode saturated the colors a bit more and slightly darkened the scene--a handy setting to have when viewing movies in a dark room.;)
Gaming Test: To see how the VH242H handled some fast-paced gaming, we played a few rounds of Call of Duty 4. This game is especially taxing on monitors for three reasons: First, the game involves fast-paced action that often has objects moving very quickly across the screen, which tests the monitor's response time. Second, the game has many dark maps where details can easily be lost among the shadows, which could easily cost you your virtual life. Lastly, the dark environments are broken up by bright flashes of gunfire and explosions, which cause high-contrast situations that easily reveal ghosting and blurring.Even though the VH242H's 5ms response time is not quite as fast as higher-end displays, it still did a great job of keeping up with everything the game could throw at it: We didn't see any ghosting or blurring. We found that Standard Mode was more than adequate for most scenes in the game. That said, we did switch over to Game Mode when the game took us to dark locales to take advantage of the mode's increased contrast.
General Usage: We used the VH242H for a number of weeks as a stand-alone monitor, a second display for a laptop, and even as an additional display for an iMac. We did everything from the above mentioned-game playing and movie watching to surfing the Web, writing e-mails, video editing, and image editing in Photoshop. The display more than met the needs of these tasks, and once again we felt that the default settings were good enough for most of our needs. When we used Photoshop, however, we had to tweak the color temperature settings a bit. Also, when we used the VH242H as a secondary display we also needed to adjust the color settings in order to get the colors of the two displays to match as close as possible.
Speaker Quality: We had the speakers cranking at a surprisingly high volume. But, the audio-quality lacked any significant bass response and audio started to clip once the volume got too high. We wouldn't count on these speakers as our primary source for listening to music, movies, or for gaming, but they do just fine for casual use, such as for watching YouTube videos.
