iiyama ProLite E2473HDS Review

Testing and Conclusion

Anyone who follows the Youtube channel will have seen the iiyama ProLite E2473HDS in action as part of our Eyefinity setup and reviews. If you haven’t I recommend catching up as monitor quality is notoriously hard to get across in text.

However what we can tell you is that the picture quality of the iiyama is outstanding. Far better than it has any right to be at this price.

Normally with a new display you have to spend a little bit of time backing the settings off from the “everything up to 11” that tends to come as default. Certainly this is to be expected as manufacturers design their default setting to be able to catch your eye in the brightly lit showrooms. Be that as it may we don’t live in a showroom and we doubt many of you do either, so the intense brightness and contrast merely serve to turn blacks to grey and lose highlight detail. The iiyama ProLite E2473HDS however comes out of the box set up nearly perfectly. There is perhaps a tiny hint towards the blue side of things, but generally speaking it’s completely usable without any tweaking at all.

Thanks to the uniform nature of that LED backlight colours really pop and there isn’t any of the edge bleeding we’ve seen from the CCFL style backlights. The difference is staggering and it’s amazing how much of an improvement that decent backlighting makes to the much (and needlessly) maligned TN panel. 

TN panels get a very short shrift online from the people who parrot what they read elsewhere and so it ends up being an endless cycle of “but TN panels such, get an IPS” without anyone particularly explaining why. The general complaint is always about viewing angles and how looking from above or the side can distort the colours. To that we say “So What?”. Do you look at your monitor end on? The only time that having a huge viewing angle can be useful is when displaying your work to a room full of people in a presentation environment and if that’s your main use then you could probably afford to splash out on a IPS or PVA panel. For everyone else we sit in front of our screens and haven’t got a huge wedge of cash to outlay.

Proving how pointless this argument is we’ve run three in Eyefinity and Triple-Screen arrangements for a while now and obviously the side monitors are more in your periphery and angled slightly in. No matter how much we moved them about (even beyond the point of a 45° box arrangement) the brightness and colour reproduction of the iiyama ProLight E2473HDS was beyond reproach.

The biggest weak point of just about every monitor on the market, and certainly every one at this end of the market is the stand. The iiyama ProLite E2473HDS is no exception as the supplied stand is much flimsier than we’re comfortable with. If you will only over plug it in once and leave it then it’ll be fine, but we wouldn’t want to have to remove it to transport the monitor. Perhaps most disappointingly is that there is only tilt adjustment (20° of) available with no portraight or even height changes available. Thankfully the price is so low and iiyama have included a VESA mount so you can easily remedy the situation by sticking a proper stand on it without busting the £200 mark.

All in all we really struggle to find anything bad to say about the ProLite E2473HDS. The brightness is spot on, colours are amazing, the contrast is good and even in the most demanding games we couldn’t see any ghosting. For £149.99 you’d be hard pressed to find a better value monitor and to get a better picture you’d have to spend a huge amount more. The ProLite is 24 inches of 1080P goodness and deserving of our OC3D Gold Award.

   

Thanks to iiyama for providing the ProLite E2473HDS for review. Discuss in our forums.