AG Neovo E-W22 review

The saving grace of this new widescreen 22-inch monitor is the picture quality, but there are problems with positioning the monitor that reduce its viability. First, the plus points.

After a brief stint in Mac OS’s Display Calibrator Assistant, you can get crisp resolution and full, well presented colours. DisplayMate still showed up some muddiness in the greys, blues and whites, but considering this was never meant to be a professional grade graphics unit, that didn’t really bother us.

The monitor has a thick sheet of plexi-glass or, as AG Neovo calls it, NeoV Optical Glass, coated with an anti-glare material. It seems to work well: it’s considerably less reflective than the new iMac’s display.

Interestingly, we were told it was stab-proof, making it a good choice for public places. We stabbed the monitor with a scalpel to test the premise, and it failed to break through, as did a good punch. The scalpel only produced light ticks on the glass.

Speedy Monitor

Without splitting hairs over grey-to-grey response times, the monitor is reasonably speedy. Movie clips play back well, too. The E-W22 sports digital (DVI) and D-Sub (VGA) ports, and a 3.5mm input for playing music through the monitor’s built-in speaker.

We’ve never seen a decent built-in speaker on any monitor except the iMac, and the E-W22 doesn’t break any new ground. The digital port is HDCP-compliant, so if ever HD copyright-protected content takes off, at least you’ll be future-proof.

Unfortunately, the stand has no height or pivot adjustment options, which is a real shame, and the monitor only tilts stiffly. The viewing angle – the oblique angle you can view the picture from without the colour skewing – is on average at about 60 degrees off-centre.

Still, you can wall-mount (VESA-compliant) the E-W22 or put it on a metal arm, which goes some way to balancing out its shortcomings.