Asus VK222H 22" widescreen LCD monitor

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Just about every set of built-in monitor speakers we’ve ever seen (or should that be heard? – Ed.) have been rubbish and it came as no surprise to find the VK222H’s pair of 2W stereo speakers were less than brilliant when we listened to them with our Xbox 360 connected over HDMI.

Audio was passed straight through without having to configure anything specially – but the result was a tinny sound with a complete lack of depth. There’s nothing new there, then.

In order to hit the 2ms (grey-to-grey) response time, Asus uses pixel overdrive technology—conveniently called Over Drive in the OSD—and there are six settings available for you to use.

Pixel overdrive technology basically increases the voltage to force liquid crystals to change state at a faster rate. Sometimes this can have an impact on the panel’s image quality, but it didn’t appear to affect things in the tests we’ve run on the VK222H.


Asus also packs in its selection of colour enhancing technology that falls under the “Splendid” brand name. The company claims that this technology enhances the overall visual quality, delivering “the best results in image preview, movie playback and gaming,” apparently, but during our testing we were unable to see the benefits of the colour modes – it threw colour accuracy right out of the window. The VK222H also includes skin colour enhancement and ADCR (Asus Dynamic Contrast Ratio) technology as well and these are said to further enhance image quality.

The VK222H also sports a claimed contrast ratio of 5,000:1 when ADCR is enabled and while that’s probably true, the fluidity of the technology is pretty viscous. The best way to describe how good it is would be to think of trying to cut the meat and veg you’re going to put in tonight’s stir fry with a dictionary – it’s an incredibly blunt tool that doesn’t work well at all. Our recommendation is to leave it off unless you like sudden changes in contrast (and brightness) when you’re switching between light and dark images on your PC.


And while we're talking about some of the monitor's features, we found navigating around the OSD a little uncomfortable to use. The buttons just didn't feel as responsive or tactile as we would have liked. We often found ourselves moving past the setting we wanted and on some occasions we managed to press completely the wrong button (our eyes are focused on the values we're changing, not where our fingers are), resetting or losing the changes we'd made. One button that seemed to constantly catch us off guard was the input switcher – it's been annoyingly placed right next to one of the menu scrolling buttons.

The display itself is housed in an unassuming piano black casing that certainly looks the part with its relatively thin bezel that measures 15mm at its thinnest, although the bottom is closer to 25mm because it also houses the aforementioned buttons. There are some crucial features missing from the chassis though – the biggest being the fact that the stand only offers tilt adjustment with a range of approximately 25 degrees. Now, that’s not so bad on its own, but the lack of any other chassis adjustment means the VK222H has very limited ergonomics unless you decide to spend more on an adjustable VESA mounting arm to connect to the back of the display.