NEC E231W monitor review

NEC touts impressive eco credentials with office-oriented display

As firms focus ever more on their power bills, hardware manufacturers are under increasing pressure to prove the eco credentials of their kit.

LCD displays are a prime example and NEC's E231W is its latest model boasting green friendly features.

The 23in E231W white LED backlit display offers a fairly standard set of specifications that includes 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, a 5ms response time and a 25,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio.

Although DVI-D and DisplayPort inputs are included on the E231W, along with standard analogue, it lacks an HDMI interface as well as any kind of internal speakers.

However, putting the controls on the front of the display rather than underneath, makes them more accessible, but opting for a small directional control for navigating menus instead of more typical left and right buttons makes it awkward to use.

We also found the menus rather archaic and not particularly intuitive.

You'll still find a range of display modes including standard, text, movie, gaming, photo and dynamic, but sadly there are no custom presets available. An auto-brightness mode combines with the built-in light sensor to adjust levels depending on the environment.

NEC claims that the N231W is particularly suited to the modern office, and there are two very good reasons why. The most important of these is energy efficiency, with the screen offering 50 per cent reduced consumption compared to TFT displays in addition to the power savings offered by the automatic light sensor.

NEC claims that the display also radiates less heat, uses less packaging (to which we can attest after seeing the surprisingly small box in which it was delivered), uses recycled plastics in production and is free of hazardous materials such as mercury and arsenic.

Backing all this up is a dedicated Eco tool that helps keep track of carbon emissions and cost savings which, while really for information purposes, is a nice addition and from a green standpoint underlines NEC's efforts in this area.

In addition to eco credentials, office workers can also benefit from an extremely flexible stand that offers height adjustment up to 110mm, -5 to +20 degree tilt and 90 degree swivel, as well as being able to rotate 90 degrees into portrait mode if required.

We were impressed by the smooth range of movement offered by the rather innovatively designed stand, although there were some stability issues when adjusting the tilt angle; we worked around this by adjusting the screen from the bottom rather than the top bezel.

When it comes to performance we weren't quite as impressed, and spent a significant amount of time attempting to tweak the levels to establish an ideal image.

The display modes weren't as effective as we'd hoped and, while noticeable changes to brightness and contrast levels seemed vaguely appropriate, colours often appeared rather washed out and not nearly as vibrant against brighter or darker backgrounds.

The Eco mode is pretty effective in dimly lit environments, although the automatic brightness adjustment using the light sensor frequently became a distraction, stepping down levels far too quickly and making things too dark to work comfortably. Despite trying each of the presets available, we ended up switching it off fairly early on.

It's almost as if NEC was aware of the difficulty in establishing a desired image as it also provides a monitor adjustment calibration tool within the Windows Display Properties dialogue box.

This presents a range of test patterns to help determine the optimum display mode for the current environment and, while useful, we can't imagine many would want to go through the process of painstakingly tweaking levels in varied environments for long.

While it's clear that the E231W is a supremely flexible display with impressive environmental credentials, it suffers somewhat from the wealth of tools on offer. It is possible to establish a decent image with a bit of manual tweaking, but we found the environmental presets and the auto-brightness adjustment (at least on 'ambient light' setting) to range from ineffective to downright distracting.

For many the advantages on offer will make these drawbacks a fairly minor grievance, but it's a shame NEC didn't back up its impressive claims with slightly tidier performance.