Setup and General Usage
Getting the 2233SW setup is pretty simple just plug in the power and plug in the VGA or DVI cable to your video card and you are good to go. I did not like that this monitor did not have any cable management at all. When I first turned on the display I really noticed the rich vibrant colors. This is because of the 15000:1 dynamic contrast. It adjusts the brightness and gamma of each frame for the best picture possible.
As I said this display is a true 16:9 screen which means instead of the typical 1680 x 1050 resolution you would normally get from a display of this size you get a 1920 x 1080. This is a much wider resolution and is becoming more and more common. Because it is such a wide display you will be able to have many windows open with more than enough room.
You can bring up the on screen menu by pressing the button on the side of the display. You have all of your typical setting such as brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. There is a menu for MagicBright which allows you to setup profiles for certain things like “Internet”, “Gaming”, and “Text” etc. The menu is really easy to navigate and it is nice that is comes up towards the bottom of the display, not right in the middle.
Our first test with this display was the brightness and contrast test. The basic rule of thumb is you don’t want the display to be too dull, too bright is ok because you can always turn that down. The brightness was turned all the way up and the display looked good, but I went ahead and turned it down just a little bit. The sharpness test was next and I noticed that the lines were very crisp and smooth.
As far as color reproduction goes this display is awesome! All colors are very vibrant and look great. The all black test is a good way to see how much backlighting will bleed through when say you are watching a movie or playing a game with dark scenes. That black test showed a little bit a bleed from the bottom of the display but really nothing that noticeable. This is one of the better backlighting jobs that I’ve seen.
Watching movies and playing games was also very enjoyable on the 2233SW. I watched quite a few 720p movies and they all looked great! When I was playing games I did not notice any skipped frames or ghosting. The 5ms response time is very adequate.
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