ViewSonic VX2835wm

The amazing evolution of bigger cheaper better LCDs breaks another barrier.

ViewSonic’s latest foray into the monitor space is more TV than monitor. It doesn’t even feature a DVI port, eschewing it in favour of HDMI – not that this is an issue, as a super handy DVI-to-HDMI cable is included to make hooking up your PC easy.

It looks like a TV too, and has no height adjustment, further pushing it into the category. What reveals it as a monitor though is its 1920 x 1200 resolution.

Then there’s the speakers at the bottom. While certainly not the most stellar example of the zenith of sound, they’re much better than the usual monitor speakers, if by pure virtue of their size. Things are a little muffled, and you get the impression the sound isn’t projecting properly, requiring the user to up the bass – which unfortunately results in distortion.

If you intend to use these speakers rather than a discrete set – which we wouldn’t advise – an interesting problem arises. It all comes down to you not being able to select your input sound source. Rather, it associates sound sources with video sources.

For instance, to get sound for composite video, you need to insert two RCA audio plugs into the composite section. Component has its own RCA jacks as well, although for using multiple video inputs this is actually a good thing. The issue lies with the 3.5mm sound jack, which is only active when you have a video signal going through D-Sub – this is a problem if you have a PC hooked up to the monitor through the DVI-to-HDMI convertor, as the monitor expects sound to be transferred only over HDMI – but of course is only receiving video. Only owners of the AMD HD2900XT will be able to use the monitor as intended in this circumstance. The final kicker is no sound will be reproduced if you don’t actually have an active video signal.

The video inputs are great – as we’ve already mentioned, it features HDMI, VGA, component, composite and of course, S-Video. The most interesting here, oddly enough, is VGA, which looks sharper and better than it has any right to – Viewsonic has really delivered the quality here.

However it’s on this mode and HDMI that another annoying little bug turns up – whenever you turn the monitor off, it forgets its sharpness settings, resetting them to a maximum of 100. Under HDMI, we found the ideal setting to be 60 as it kept things sharp without creating artefacts, while 100 looked awful. We hope this is fixed in upcoming firmware revisions of the panel, as it’s certainly a show-stopper for us. The monitor has no issues with this through composite/component.

As an added bonus, component worked perfectly in 1080p using our Xbox 360.

DisplayMate revealed the ability to distinguish from 1 to 251 out of 255 shades on the greyscale tests, and on the colour ramps it showed the rare ability of not getting too dark too quickly. Movies were amazingly good, as was gaming, providing you ignore the wasteful preset image modes and settle for your own custom settings. Viewing angles are decent meaning a few people can join in on the fun, but Dell’s 2707 was better in this regard.

The menu is easy enough to understand but navigation is a pain the arse due to the placement of the power button, which sits directly between the navigation buttons and the menu buttons. The monitor also takes a long time to turn on.

The box claims that video cables and audio cables are included, however at the time of review ViewSonic was unable to provide a finalised list of cables included. Included in our box was a DVI-to-HDMI cable, and bizarrely VGA-to-component.

The VX2835 is an excellent monitor with a few problems. Providing the sharpness bug is fixed, at $500 less and one inch more than the Dell 2707, it represents excellent value. So for now, a seven, and when that bug is fixed consider it an 8½.