Designed by gamers, for gamers.
Screen and color production
The XL2420T surprisingly offers a TN panel, which is quite a bummer for its price tag. But the quality and performance is where it’s at, and the BenQ has absolutely no issues slugging it out.
In our FlatPanelsDK test, the monitor produced accurate colors and smooth gradients. There were no banding issues whatsoever, giving a perfectly balanced final picture with punchy colors and deep blacks (under the correct settings, of course).
In terms of bleeding or clouding, it was a complete non-issue for the screen, which is incredibly impressive.
Text
We dosed text over various colors and backgrounds, and the XL2420T held up pretty well. I only found purple twinge under certain colors, but during regular use, that was a complete non-issue.
Ghosting
The XL2420T is an all-out gaming monitor, with a speedy pixel response time and 120Hz refresh rate. Which is why it was shocking to find bits of trailing while playing games. This is most easily noticed in games like Counter Strike, where bullet holes on grey walls clearly leave an electric trail when the cursor is moved slowly. This did not result in lag of any sort but the visual feedback was jarring once I started noticing it. It was a non-issue during movie playback, however.
Viewing angle
Here’s where the shortcomings of a TN panel is really noticeable. When viewed from an extreme side angle, the picture suffers from color shifting; whites appear yellow-ish and black, gray.
Conclusion
The BenQ XL2420T truly defines the ‘gaming monitor’ category by offering features and options that cater to the core gamer. The only bit to decide, however, is that is it worth paying AED 2000 over? For hardcore gamers, the BenQ offers a great numbers of features with the Black Equalizer, Smart Scaling and downloadable pro-presets, not to mention the intuitive OSD system and the handy S-switch. Beyond that, for users who are looking for a solid, good quality display first over everything else, the BenQ is a hard one to convince.
It’s wealth of features, I/O ports, performance, and ergonomics certainly makes it our favorite of the lot, though, and is a definite Editor’s Choice for mid-sized gaming monitors.
