Review: AOC E2251S-WDN 21.5in LED Monitor
As part of my new build work PC, I bought two AOC E2251S-WDN 21.5in LED Monitors. The first thing that you notice is how slim these monitors are; not including the base, the E2251S measures only 1cm thick. There are DVI-D and 15 pin D-SUB connectors with a small power input at the rear of the monitor. But because of the thinness of this screen; the inputs are horizontal rather than vertical, which kinda negates the thinness of the monitor and looks ugly. But I guess many people would have the back of the monitor facing a wall so it probably doesn’t matter but it looks terrible if the rear of your monitors are ‘customer facing’, which is annoying as there is an attractive pattern on the rear!
The display itself is reasonable for a budget monitor, but I don’t seem to be able to get blacks to look black; all black colours appear dark grey. The brightness of the screen is very high with a claimed contrast ratio of 20M:1, so there is no issue seeing what is displayed on screen even in bright sunlight, which is helped by the matte black screen finish, almost eliminating reflections. The E2251S offers 5ms response time and 1920×1080 (1080p) resolution, the extra screen real estate is great for anyone doing graphical or design work, my 1600×900 laptop seems inadequate now!
The big issue with this monitor is the controls. First of all they are very inconsistent in their response and they are of the capacitive type; there is no tactile response at all. And worst of all, the onscreen controls are immense; way too many menus for a monitor. There are controls for luminance, color setup, picture boost and those are just the image controls. I would much rather have physical buttons with brightness, contrast, color, sharpness and maybe color temperature, which can all be in one menu. Frankly all the different adjustments on the E2251S-WDN makes my head hurt!
The conclusion is that if you will be using this monitor with the rear ‘customer facing’, and want something simple to setup; look elsewhere. But if you will be having the rear facing a wall or in a home office where appearance isn’t important and enjoy having oodles of controls to play with, then rush out and buy this monitor; the image tweaking options will keep you busy for many hours!