Design and features
HP's w185 is an 18.5-inch, 1366x768 monitor, with menu and power buttons under the bezel on the right-hand side. The aim is clearly for a clean design, but the end result is annoyance for the user as the buttons are harder to use than face-mounted ones.
Adjustments are limited to simply tilt, so in the very likely event you'll need extra height, you'll be stacking this on the last remaining phone books or encyclopedias you have. There's no cable management to speak of, so your power, DVI, VGA and 3.5mm audio cables will hang loose if you use the full complement of available ports.
The menu system is basic and easy enough to use once you find your way around the buttons, and offers simple adjustments like brightness, contrast, 6500K/9300K/custom and sRGB colour modes as well as in-built profiles that set all of these for you, including "Movie", "Photo", "Gaming" and "Text".
Performance
The w185 is based off twisted nematic technology and as such, the viewing angles aren't great. When combined with HP's lack of height, the poor vertical viewing angles really start to show.
Testing the monitor over DVI, it was immediately apparent that there was a lack of sharpness and considerable pixel bleed in the text. This was strangely enough fixed by switching to "Gaming" mode; however, this also had the unexpected side effect of shifting all the blacks to grey.
Loading up DisplayMate, while the w185 could display all 255 greyscale tones, the greyscale gradients showed significant banding at the darker end of the scale, with a high tendency to display greens and purples instead of greys. Colour gradients also exhibited the same banding problems at the dark end of the scale. Movie watching and gaming was passable, but not amazing. The speakers were also not so bad considering the size of the monitor, but realistically if you're listening to anything other than basic system sounds, you'll want a real speaker set instead.
Its limitations mean that the only scenario we can recommend the w185 in is where you need a dirt cheap monitor for extremely basic use, like to throw in a server room. Otherwise if you're looking for quality, we'd look elsewhere.
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