ViewSonic's LED back-lit monitor leaves a lot to be desired in the performance stakes, especially considering its price.

Design
ViewSonic's 22-inch, 1,680x1,050 monitor follows the same design ethos of its forebears, with piano-black plastic around the bezel, a perforated speaker bar along the bottom, and a basic stand that offers tilt adjustment only. Five buttons are found at the bottom of the screen just above the ViewSonic logo; the "1", "2", down and up buttons are used for menu navigation, and located in the middle is the customary power button. The "1" button also loads the on-screen menu, and similarly the "2" acts as a toggle between the VGA and DVI inputs, available on the back of the monitor. Cable management is offered through two loops on the back of the neck, and the monitor originally arrives detached from the base for easier transport.

Features
The VLED221wm is fairly stock in terms of features — unlike BenQ, ViewSonic includes a DVI cable in the package, as well as the requisite VGA cable, power cable, and a two-metre long 3.5mm audio cable to hook your PC into the monitor speakers. As the model name suggests, it uses an LED for its backlight, which supposedly gives access to better colour representation and consumes less power.

The usual colour temperatures are offered as well as an sRGB mode, but nothing we did would correct the positively neon reds and the over-powerful greens. While the monitor features a claimed 12,000:1 contrast ratio, this is via Dynamic Contrast Ratio (DCR). DCR alters the brightness depending on the scene displayed in an attempt to show a greater range of colours. In theory it sounds great, but in practice it's vastly annoying, and on the VLED221wm in particular it results in a jarring high magnitude brightness shift that heavily disrupts concentration during workflow. It also actively gets in the way of enjoying a good movie. While most manufacturers offer the choice to turn the unholy DCR off in the menu, ViewSonic has chosen to obfuscate the process by making you hold down the "up" button for a few seconds, something you're likely to never discover unless you pored over the manual. Once turned off, contrast ratio returns to a typical 1,000:1.

Performance
Out of the box, colour was hideously overcooked and oversaturated in sRGB mode to the point of puncturing our retinas and etching the nuclear-type colours on our brains. We quickly retreated to a custom set-up to try and get some more natural colours out of the monitor that didn't shift our photographs to super-super-dance-explosion-high-contrast-mode — sometimes a difficult proposition in light of a wide-gamut monitor displaying an environment designed for non-managed sRGB.

After considerable tweaking we approached something that was almost passable (requiring both extensive sessions through the monitor and GPU control panel), but the reds were always a ridiculously burning neon, and greens far too prevalent. To compound the situation, viewing angles on both horizontal and vertical were nothing short of miserable.

The built-in speakers are of course, token, and we don't recommend you use them at all unless you're just after something to push out Windows system sounds. If you want to listen to music, get yourself a decent pair of stand-alone speakers and bypass them altogether.

Colour and DCR issues aside, gaming was fine under the 5ms response time, with Half Life 2: Episode 2 being perfectly playable.

DisplayMate performance was average, the monitor capable of showing a range of 4-253 out of 255 possible greyscale tones. It had a tendency to crush blacks early on, as well as being far too powerful in the green and red channels, which resulted in the high end of colour gradients displaying a solid block.

The recommended retail price is a stratospheric AU$979 — fortunately, you can find it between AU$600 and AU$700 at the time of writing with a quick search of Staticice.

The VLED221wm is not a good monitor, and worse, it's expensive. There's cheaper and much better options out there, or if you can stretch the budget a little bit further (or even want to save money if you're going off the retail price!), bigger and higher quality monitors are available.