ASUS LS221H

With diamond cut corners, a leather panel below the screen and anti-reflection glass, ASUS’ LS221H certainly looks sophisticated. At just 45mm thick, ASUS claims it is also the world’s slimmest 22in LCD monitor.

The LS221H is certainly one of the most stylish monitors we’ve reviewed. It has a glossy black bezel and a circle-shaped stand. Disappointingly, it is not height adjustable, although it is wall mountable. Below the screen is a small chrome bar that houses the controls: six buttons, including a stylish, blue-backlit power button.

A glossy screen would normally be a negative point, but ASUS has equipped the LS221H with anti-reflection glass. In an office environment with bright florescent lighting it performed exceptionally well considering its glossy panel. Additionally, the glass surface is diamond cut and 9H hardness-rated for protection against damage. It certainly feels extremely sturdy and well built, and its horizontal and vertical viewing angles are reasonable.

The LS221H has a native resolution of 1680x1050. It has five image mode presets — standard, theatre, game, night view and scenery — and these are easily selected by pressing a mode button on the front panel. We found the standard mode to be best for day-to-day use such as word processing and Internet browsing. Text is reasonably accurate with little noise and no visible aberrations around the edges. You can adjust a number of image settings, including brightness, contrast, sharpness and saturation. Users can also switch between three skin tones and five colour temperature settings.

ASUS’ Splendid Video Intelligence Technology aims to automatically correct and adjust the monitor's image depending on what is displayed. Although it does a reasonable job the constant shifting can get a little frustrating; most users will prefer to adjust the settings themselves. The LS221H produced good results in our DisplayMate tests, with impressive detail in dark areas, helped by minimal reflection despite the glossy panel. There was slight backlight bleeding on dark screens, but it isn’t too noticeable and shouldn’t be cause for concern.

A 2ms response time means the LS221H is well suited for reproducing fast motion such as action movies or video games. When connected to a Blu-ray player via HDMI we found minimal ghosting. The same applied when connected to the Xbox 360 Elite. In some games and movies fine dark details did get lost and skin tones were a little oversaturated, but these are both minor issues.