Product Listing

ASUS VS239H-P LED Monitor - IPS Goodness for You and Me

By Ng Chong Seng - 20 Feb 2012
Launch SRP: S$269

Setup & OSD

QuickFit Virtual Scale

The labels of the controls are printed along the bottom bezel. Farthest to the right is the LED status indicator.

As mentioned in the previous page, the control buttons are all situated underneath the frame at the bottom right hand corner, with their labels silk-screened onto the bezel. We foresee the first button being the most frequently used one as it cycles through the six video presets, including an sRGB mode. If you’re using a VGA connection, holding down this button for a few seconds will activate the auto adjustment function. The VS239H-P also comes with a feature called QuickFit, which aims to help designers work more efficiency by providing real-size, on-screen guidelines of different document and photo sizes. To activate it, just press the second control button. The Menu button is used to cycle through the grids, while the arrow buttons lets you shift their positions left and right.

The alignment grid divides the screen into a 3 by 3 grid. Each rectangle is about 17 x 9.5cm.

Letter size guides shown against a white, semi-transparent background. For each of these document guides, there are two backgrounds: one with this white background, and one without.

4 x 6-inch, 3 x 5-inch, and 2 x 2-inch.

8 x 10-inch and 5 x 7-inch.

 

Menu

The VS239H-P's on-screen display (OSD) menu is easy to understand and navigate about; the latter in large part due to the presence of tactile buttons. The settings are logically grouped in five menus on the left: Splendid, Color, Image, Input Select and System Setup. Splendid simply refers to the video presets: Scenery, Standard, Theater, Game, Night View, and sRGB. You can activate anyone of them via this menu or by pressing the shortcut button on the monitor. Also, if you need to reset any of the adjustments done to a preset, this is where it'll be done.

For color management, you've to go to the Color tab. Parameters like brightness, contrast, saturation, color temperature, and skin tone are adjusted here. Depending on the connection and preset being used, some of these settings might be grayed out. For example, when using the Standard preset, you can't adjust saturation and skin tone settings. By default, color temperature is set to User Mode (with R, G, and B gains all at 100%); the other options are Cool, Normal, and Warm. Similarly, the Skin tone setting will change (or not made available) depending on the video preset you're in; three skin tone presets are offered: Reddish, Natural, and Yellowish. If you like to watch movies on your monitor while lying on your bed, the monitor has a Smart View function. In ASUS' own words, it will "deliver the same image quality and colors with straight viewing". Our first impressions were that the screen looked brighter, with blacks that looked more like dark grays.

The Image tab holds controls like sharpness, aspect ratio control, Trace Free and ASCR. Aspect ratio can only be changed when an HDMI connection is used. There are three settings: Full, 4:3 (only when the monitor detects a 4:3 signal), and OverScan. Increasing Trace Free value essentially overdrives the liquid crystals more to achieve better response times, which can be helpful in games. ASCR stands for ASUS Smart Contrast Ratio, and it's basically ASUS' dynamic contrast ratio implementation. ASUS boosts a spec of 50,000,000:1.

There's no surprise hidden in the final two menus, Input Select and System Setup, though it's worth noting that if you're keen to save some energy, the Eco modes (on/off) reside in System Setup.

There is a total of six video preset modes.

Most presets will allow you to adjust at least the brightness, contrast, color temperature, and Smart View settings.

Three color temperature presets are available: Cool, Normal, and Warm.

Trace Free determines how much the panel is overdrived and this affects response times.

Settings in the System Setup menu are, well, pretty self-explanatory. The only setting on the second page of this menu is the option to reset all settings to factory defaults.

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8.5
  • Design 8
  • Features 8.5
  • Performance 8.5
  • Value 8.5
The Good
HDMI input with HDCP support
Good pixel responsiveness; overdrive level adjustable in the menu
Good color accuracy out of the box
Very competitively priced for an IPS monitor
The Bad
Very limited ergonomic adjustments
Inaccurate sRGB mode
Dynamic contrast not particularly useful in real-life tasks
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