Not on these Iiyama beauties!... that's why they're so hard to get hold of. Got an excellent review in Custom PC and have been sold out in the UK ever since. Dabs had a four week wait for stock last week (but this is the second time) so I cancelled my order with them... trying to aquire one direct from iiyama!.
See below for full review...
Iiyama ProLite E431S
VERDICT: Makes games look fantastic and is great in virtually every single way
When the epic book 'Rise and Fall of the 19in CRT' is eventually published, the final few pages will be quite clear about the harbinger of its doom. 'I blame the damn Iiyama ProLite E431S,' the foul-mouthed author will cry, 'that's what did for it'. For in one fell swoop, Iiyama has destroyed all the arguments people have been using against TFT monitor's for all these years.
Too expensive? Hardly - at £336, it's around the same price as a quality 19in CRT. Too dark? We think not. Like all the screens here, it's probably much brighter than your current monitor. And as for the can't-play-games argument - well, that's completely blown out of the water.
Admittedly, the ProLite isn't the first TFT to laugh in the face of games. BenQ and Hitachi's screens have been around for a few months, all boasting 16ms response times, and consequently even the fastest action is completely free of lag - you just don't even think about it. In fact, all I could think about as I mercilessly shot my way through deathmatch after deathmatch was how damn good I was at Unreal Tournament 2003 (until I realised it was on the easy difficulty setting).
But what really impressed us about the ProLite was its image quality, as games looked simply superb. If you've bought a top-end graphics card recently, you deserve a screen like this to show off its capabilities.
In fact, there was only one point when we doubted the screen's gaming ability, and that was in a particularly dark level of Acclaim Entertainment's under-rated classic Re-Volt. We couldn't see a thing in the shadows. Within milliseconds we were reaching for the OSD, praying for a gamma control - and there it was. Switching to Gamma Mode 1 was but a few short clicks away, and this solved the problem instantly, all without any need to fiddle around with the graphics card driver or game's settings.
The ProLite proved to be similarly brilliant in our everyday tests too. Whether connected via analog D-SUB cable or digital DVI, the sharp Windows desktop was a joy to behold. It was the same story in Word, when browsing the Internet and viewing photos, while our tough DisplayMate tests - which checked for colour-blending abilities and over-saturation - proved to be a formality.
So you can gather that we like this screen, but even we're willing to admit that it's not perfect. One area where a CRT is still superior, and by quite some way, is DVD playback. As with most 16ms response TFT monitors, the E431S's problem wasn't in keeping up with the action but with artefacts. Even from normal TV-viewing distance, artefacts were visible in the background.
CRTs still hold the viewing angle advantage too, as the ProLite's brightness appears to vary when you move your head away from the optimum position.
If we were going to be very harsh, we could also criticise the speakers, as it's fair to say they don't scream high-fidelity audio. But you can't expect Bang & Olufsen-like mid-range and bass from two tiny drivers built into a plastic-framed computer monitor. And at the end of the day the speakers in the E431S are bearable for background music listening if you set them at low volume.
But, to be frank, we don't care about the speakers really. What we care about is image quality, and the Iiyama ProLite E431S has this in abundance. What's more, it's an absolute bargain at £336. And if you buy it from
www.pcnextday.co.uk (who proved to be the cheapest in our survey of all the leading online retailers) then it's simplicity itself to buy a 1.8m long DVI signal cable for £8.49, or a 3m cable for £10.