The HP w2408h is a 24-inch monitor seemingly designed for use by graphics professional with its high 92 percent colour gamut and flexible viewing modes. But how does it perform?

Design
The HP features the ever-popular combination of a silver and piano-black finish. It's relatively classy, and the controls are well located on the fascia -- though for some reason the power button is located on the top.

This stand is fully height adjustable and will also flip into portrait mode -- there are also clasps to hold your cables in place so it's easier to manoeuvre. These little touches extend to the stand itself: it's designed so that an HP keyboard can be docked on top to keep it out of the way.

One thing we did find is that our screen didn't sit fully square -- it tilted a little to the right. In the end we had to prop the HP up with something as it wouldn't swivel enough to even out.

Features
For a monitor hovering at the one grand mark, the w2408h does lack some of the features of its competitors -- though its ergonomics render it more flexible.

The 24-inch panel itself boasts a 5ms response time (on to off) and HP's BrightView Technology for better contrast. It has a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels, making it capable of displaying high-def content.

For connecting PCs and other digital equipment the monitor comes with an HDMI port with HDCP support -- for decoding 1080p content. Unusually, it lacks a DVI connector, which OS versions seem to have, so you'll need to buy a DVI-HDMI cable.

Unlike the HP's main competitor, the Dell 2407WFP-HC , this monitor lacks advanced features like component, S-Video and Picture-in-Picture.

Rounding out the feature count, though, are a set of onboard speakers (2 x 2W) which can decode HDMI audio, and four USB ports including two on the side.

Performance
Considering this is one of the few monitors which can be viewed in portrait mode, we tried this first and found it worked quite effectively. The whole screen remains fully lit -- so you don't need to tilt or move your head constantly to look at different parts of the screen. However, looking at it from the sides in this orientation renders the screen negative and unreadable.

Back in landscape mode, the HP's colour performance is very impressive: its ability with colour makes Web pages and games alike look spectacular. For an LCD, black levels are also very good.

Playing the PC game Crysis was a revelatory experience. If you have a machine grunty enough then this monitor can make it shine. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, on the other hand, did show up a tiny flaw -- when the HP displays a black screen there is backlight leakage from the bottom of the screen.

While photos look colourful and bright, we initially found the reflective coating could be distracting when viewing text -- all the letters had a faint blue ghosting effect. Calibrating the monitor alleviated this somewhat, though the lack of dedicated "Picture" modes means that this may not be the best for watching movies.

It's worthwhile to note that your PC's graphics card and processor perform the image processing done by most modern TVs and DVD players. If you plug a device such as the PlayStation 3 into the HP, though, it acts simply as a monitor. As a result, we wouldn't recommend it as a first choice for movie fans. While a Blu-ray like Mission Impossible 3 looked good, the graininess of the film ends up overemphasised. The detail and colour are still good though.

This is an excellent monitor, but we feel that the Dell UltraSharp 2407WFP- HC offers more features and performance for the same or less money -- if you can pin down a good deal on their Web site (it's at AU$849 at the time of writing).