Iiyama has marketed the E435S-W as having the fastest response time – 10ms – of any budget TFT. However, response times nowadays are almost irrelevant. Ghosting and smearing were a big problem when combined rise and fall times were 40ms or greater, but modern response times bear little resemblance to whether a panel is any good or not (see Focus on… response times on p135 for more details). When assessing response time, none of the TFTs this month showed too much ghosting or blur to fail, so Iiyama gains no extra marks here.
This is unfortunate, as there aren’t many other noteworthy points about this monitor. The white/beige colour doesn’t help matters, but you can buy the E435S-W in black. Worse still, there’s also an annoying external power supply. When you bear in mind that Relisys’ stylish TL795 offers similar quality and boasts more features for less money, reasons for buying the E435S-W start vanishing.
Still, the stand is solid and allows you to swivel the screen easily. No cable-tidying system is present, though, and the bezel is too thick to be comfortably used on an Extended Desktop. At the bottom resides a pair of speakers, but, as usual, they distort when you push the volume to the max. At least the OSD is comprehensive. We’re particular fans of the quick mode-switching button, which flicks between picture, text and two dimming economy modes.
In our video assault course, the E435S-W got off to a ropey start. A DVI-connected monitor should waltz through the fine-focus and pixel-tracking sections, but there was some definite movement in the middle mesh pattern, which meant it dropped points. Green and white colour purities were fine, although there was a little too much backlight showing through in the black purity test for our liking.
Colour combinations weren’t bad, with only yellow and green being hard to read on a magenta backing. But the panel was woeful in our white-level saturation test, with only 245 out of 256 shades of white showing up. At least this excessive brightness helped almost all dark grey squares become visible. Still, we were quite impressed with the colour ramps, as range and was good and banding minimal – only the greyscale bar topped out early. Several colour scale bars suffered similarly but at least a decent colour spectrum was displayed.
The Iiyama proved a competent performer in the real-world tests, even though viewing angles were average rather than excellent. Ultimately, while it will satisfy undemanding users, there are cheaper, better options elsewhere.
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