20" widescreen monitor group test

Costing them up

So how do we rate the different monitors with regards to their price?

What's clear is that the Viewsonic 2012W isn't worth buying. At £329, it's only £11 cheaper than the £340 VX2025 model, which we have shown is clearly superior. We'd also suggest that although the BenQ is the cheapest overall (£317), it's still worth spending an extra £23 to get the Viewsonic VX2025. When you're spending over £300 on a monitor, it's not worth skimping just to save a few quid.

The Acer and NEC monitors are in a slightly different price league, priced £411 and £423 respectively - a full £70-80 more than the VX2025. We believe that the Acer is overpriced in this range - although it offers comparable features to the NEC, with the glossy coating, the NEC has a better raw specification in terms of response time and brightness.

So, the fight for which to buy basically comes down to the Viewsonic VX2025 and the NEC 20WGX, with the NEC some 25% more expensive. Which you want to buy will really come down to whether or not you want the glossy, overbright feel or whether you're happy to go without that. What does the glossy coating add?


We've said that it adds vibrancy and depth, but that it can increase reflectivity in normal lighting situations. If you're a gamer that likes to play in the dark, the reflectivity won't be an issue and you'll absolutely love the intense colour in gaming situations. There's also a minor added convenience of USB on the side of the monitor and the awesome menu system that makes it easy to tweak your monitor for different profiles. If you're looking for a monitor purely for desktop work, we'd also say that the NEC is definitely the one to go for, with the brightness and glossyness being fantastic for standard work.

However, we have to come out and say that the VX2025 is better for gaming, and so that's where we'd put our money. We found that it had the best black scaling of any monitor on test here, and Quake 4 was a tangibly better game for it. It doesn't have the glossy coating, meaning that you don't have to switch the lights off to play. It is, of course, £80 cheaper, which may sway some people.

Final thoughts

In the end, we're giving the VX2025 our Excellence award. We think it's the best gaming widescreen monitor on test and we're actually going to be giving you guys the chance to win one over the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned. However, we can also appreciate that many people love glossy coated displays and will lap up the NEC like crazy, so we're giving that our Recommended award too.

If you guys are interested, we can follow up this testing with some more games and some more tests if you'd like us to run specific things of interest. Head over to our Article Discussion forum and make some noise! While you're there, we're happy to answer any questions you might have about any of these displays, or about other aspects of the monitor market.

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