If you've been holding off buying an HD-ready monitor until you felt the price was low enough for you to afford, then now might be a good time to invest in one. HANNSG has a reputation for producing stylish monitors with a good performance record, and you'd be hard pushed to find many better deals for 22-inch monitors than the HG216DP; it's officially valued at £179 but has been spotted on the Web for as little as £135.Once you get it out of the box you'll be able to appreciate its chic silver and black design and the cool neon blue logo that lights up when you power on, although it's a lot chunkier than many of its rivals, at 518mm x 230mm x 412mm and 5.8kg.
The controls are discreetly hidden under the bottom right of the display but are easy to operate, with the usual manual and auto settings plus scrolling buttons. The stand, though, took some shoving to fix in place and offers only a 20-degree tilt and no height adjustment.
It's when you get around the back that you notice that - as well as the standard VGA and audio inputs - there's also an HDMI input in place of the usual DVI. For those not in the know, a High-Definition Multimedia Interface is the first to provide uncompressed digital video and audio, so you end up with a ‘pure' translation from the source. HDMI has a 5Gbps bandwidth which means it has lots of spare capacity for future expansion.
With a respectable 1,000:1 contrast ratio, 16.7 million colours and 300cd/m2 brightness, you know the colours are going to be vivid and distinct, but the big bonus is an outstanding top resolution of 1,680 x 1,050. When allied to the quick 5ms response time, games like Hellgate London never looked so devilishly attaractive on the PC, and PS3 users should be especially ecstatic that they can make good use of their two HDMI outputs.
DVD films also come out crisp and sharp and Xbox 360 owners will be viewing graphically gorgeous games like Assassin's Creed and Medal of Honor Airborne with new eyes. On the audio side you're supplied with a pair of pretty ineffectual 1W speakers, but it was always going to be inevitable that you'd take your audio feed from elsewhere (ideally a powerful 5.1 surround sound system) to match the visual eye candy on-screen.
