Chimei 946D

It's Chimei-cheap and surprisingly good. Buy three for the price of one 'big name' screen.

The Chimei 946D has an alarmingly low price tag for the amount of screen real estate it provides. Strangely enough though, the image quality is actually better than you’d expect for the price.

The 946D is a 19” widescreen monitor with a native resolution of 1440 x 900. Although it performs admirably, Chimei has cut a few corners in manufacturing in the quest for a great screen at a reasonable price.

The 946D feels both lightweight and a little on the cheap side. This is made less of a problem thanks to the monitor’s low centre of gravity; which is achieved by using a single hinge to provide tilt adjustment. You don’t get pan and height controls, and the viewing angle is a little below what we’ve come to expect of more expensive monitors. Like us, you may find yourself propping the 946D up on something (in our case, an external DVD drive) if you don’t want to lower your chair position.

After firing up DisplayMate for testing, we noticed that some of the monitor’s brighter grays had a slightly purple tint. The problem only affected a small percentage of the grays and was a minor yet uniform problem, and as such didn’t noticeably hinder everyday use. While watching some DVDs we did notice clouds were slightly off-white, but only because we had measured and were aware of the problem.

Otherwise, the monitor rendered the tests well; faring better in dark scenes that than it did in brighter ones. We could discern a black level down to 6, and a white level up to 247 on DisplyMate’s brightness scale. Switching from the DVI input to the VGA input yielded similar results; however as we expected test patterns weren’t as crisp.

The picture quality may be below average, but the gap between average and the images that the Chimei 946D produces is very small. So small in fact that many won’t notice the difference between this basic, cheap and cheerful monitor and more elaborate LCD monitors. For this reason we're awarding it a high 8/10. The value outweighs any minimal quality shortcomings.

It’s impossible to deny the value of the 964. You could buy three of them for less than the price of a single 24 inch monitor. Two 964D’s would make an excellent and cheap dual display setup, and small businesses who are buying in bulk for non image-critical applications should now be cheering loudly. As such we heartily recommend them for anyone who wants to save money but not sacrifice on size or quality.