ViewSonic VP2468

A pro panel for a puny price?

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY BUCKS. That’s all you now need to stump up for a 24-inch, Full-HD, IPS, multi-input, fully-adjustable PC monitor. Prices really have tumbled over the last five years.

If that’s the new norm, it’s also the highly competitive context in which ViewSonic’s latest, the VP2468, must strut its stuff. The good news is that its feature set does indeed go a little beyond that norm. For the record, it begins with the aforementioned IPS panel and its 1920x1080 pixels. Inevitably at this price point, it’s almost certainly a 6-bit-per-channel panel in hardware terms, and uses dithering to achieve the claimed 16.7 million colors.

However, the VP2468 also supports 14-bit 3D look-up tables, plus six-axis color adjustment functionality. Both are a little unusual for this class of display, and elevate the VP2468’s utility beyond the budget-monitor masses. Its static contrast, meanwhile, is rated at 1,000:1, the maximum refresh at native resolution is 60Hz, the backlight is a simple white LED affair, and max brightness is 250cd/m2. If all that, bar the color management stuff, is pretty much par for the course, ViewSonic has also thrown in a decent array of input options, including two HDMI inputs, both full and mini DisplayPort connectors, and a DisplayPort-out for daisy chaining. Nice.

But if there’s anything that really makes the VP2468 stand out physically, it’s the bezels. There are numerous affordable monitors with slim bezels on three sides. But the VP2468 ups the ante to all four. In other words, it lacks the big, fat chin of most slim-bezel designs. The result is a pleasingly minimalist design, and one that looks conspicuously compact for a 24inch panel. The fully adjustable stand with swivel, rotate, tilt, and height tweakability is a welcome inclusion, too.

All of which just leaves the minor matter of how this display performs. The VP2468 is pitched as a cheap solution for professional applications, and with that in mind, each panel comes factory calibrated, complete with a printout of the results, and a promise that all color deltas are below two. The upshot is a nicely set-up display, with excellent detail in both black and white scales. As you’d expect from an IPS display, the viewing angles are excellent, too.

Another plus point concerns the twotier OSD menu. With both a simple menu for frequently used settings and a fuller option that includes more settings, it’s extremely pleasant to use. The only obvious omission is an option for adjusting the pixel overdrive. Handily, that brings us to the first of the VP2468’s image quality issues. The pixel response is mediocre. Worse, there is occasionally some fairly obvious inverse ghosting with certain colors and shapes. As if that isn’t enough, the likely fact that this is a cheap 6-bit IPS panel is all too obvious when viewing color gradients. The tell-tale banding is, sadly, clearly evident.

We’re not crazy about the contrast, vibrancy, and colors, either. We had a 4K TN monitor running in parallel during our review process, and it had this ViewSonic comprehensively beaten for subjective contrast and color vibrancy, which goes to show you shouldn’t always base your buys on panel type. The comparison also highlighted a lack of punch from the backlight, and a slight dirtiness to the quality of the white tones. It’s not the purest, whitest panel you could wish for.

Of course, this is an affordable $250 screen, it has a strong feature set, and its shortcomings are largely generic. Cheap 6-bit IPS panels aren’t pretty. If you need the special features the VP2468 offers, most notably the 14-bit 3D look-up tables and six-axis color controls, it may make sense at this aggressive price point. For everyone else, we advise throwing a few more dollars at your display.