If you're in the market for a 22-inch TFT monitor and have a limited budget, the 220WS8FS from Philips may well be worth a look. Its price is kept down by simplicity of design and lack of features, but not at the expense of quality.

With a resolution of 1,680 by 1,050 pixels there's plenty of desktop space. It has a contrast ration of 1,000:1, a quoted brightness level of 300cd/m2 and a response time of just 5ms. The screen doesn't have any form of glossy coating, a fact that may appeal to a lot of people.

To keep costs down the 220WS8FS only has DVI and VGA outputs, but the DVI connector does have HDCP support so you can play Blu-ray or HD DVD movies using it.

The stand is unusual in that its base has to be screwed on, which obviously take a lot longer than the normal clip-on base, and there doesn't seem to be any justification for it: the only feature the stand provides is forward and backward tilt, though it does have VESA mounting holes for wall mounting.

To control the on-screen display (OSD) are four buttons on the bottom right of the bezel, along with a power indicator light and the power button. The four menu buttons consist of Auto, Brightness, Contrast and Menu. The Auto button is used to optimise the picture when the monitor is connected to an analogue source. The Brightness and Contrast buttons also turn into left and right menu selection buttons to make any adjustments.

Pressing the Menu button reveals a disappointingly small number of options. The colour change option allows a choice of four alternatives; Original, 9,300k, 6,500k and sRGB, or you can manually adjust the Red, Green and Blue settings. The only other things in the menu are a language change for the OSD, position and reset.

Out of the box the monitor is set to a colour temperature of 6,500k which, although offering a decent level of brightness, does leave everything with a yellow tinge and also produced a slight backlight bleed. A switch to the Original setting produced colder, much more preferable tones (even if the blue was slightly overemphasised) and reduced the backlight bleed.

The 220WS8FS performed well in our gradient tests with smooth results in both the greyscale and colour tests and all steps well defined, but a little disappointing was the sharpness of text, particularly at small point sizes.

HD content was crisply displayed with good bold colours and good contrast ratios; in fact all that was missing was the warmth of some of the more expensive monitors in this market sector. However, there are better monitors around for HD playback which don't cost much more than the 220WS8FS.

Verdict
The Philips 220WS8FS is perhaps best suited to an office environment where image quality is more important than style and a whole host of unused features, but in the home it is up against some better performing and better featured monitors for not much more money.

Company: Philips

Contact: 020 7949 0069

Tags: digital visual interface contrast ratio video graphics array tft lcd high-bandwidth digital content protection srgb vga 1080p