Dec

Viewsonic VA2226w Review - 22 inch Widescreen LCD Monitor

Written by Neil Galloway

I just purchased the Viewsonic VA2226w 22 inch Widescreen LCD the other day. There was a boxing day special on at Best Buy for $229. The monitor is pretty sweet compared to my 17 inch square LCD that I had before.

It gives way more screen real estate to work with. It is a 21.6 inch viewable area screen. I don't need to run my web browser in full screen mode any more because the content fits in the browser when it is only a little over half of the screen width. I can have another screen open on the right side or even a video playing.

I run the screen in 1680x1050 resolution which looks quite nice as well. With a screen that size, the icons and text are still a really good size.

Viewsonic VA2226w Features

It is pretty nice monitor and here are a few things I wanted it for.

It is one of the cheapest 22 inch monitors on the market.
There is HDCP support so it will be able to handle encryption (BluRay) in the future if I hook up another device to it.
Very light. It is lighter than my 17 inch LCD.
DVI and the old D-sub (VGA) inputs.
2000:1 contrast ratio.

Here is the Viewsonic VA2226w Product Page.

Viewsonic VA2226w and Widescreen on nVidia GeForce FX 5200

I wasn't sure if it would work with my current video card either, but turns out it works just fine. The nVidia GeForce FX 5200 can support wide-screen modes up to 1680 x 1050 just fine. How well the FX5200 will handle games with the higher resolutions will be another story I will write about.

If you cannot get the setting for 1680 x 1050 then you need to download the latest drivers from the nVidia Driver Download page. Just install the drivers, restart your computer, and you will have the option in your display configuration page to select the higher resolutions.

I also found this article on getting FX 5200 to do widescreen.

What Is Bad About The Viewsonic VA2226w

I can't think of much right now. It is a very basic monitor so I might find it lacking in the future. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of a lot of monitors and most notably it is missing the following.

No Speakers
No Webcam or microphone.
No HDMI input. With no speakers this kind of makes sense.

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Category: Computers

1 Comments

AnhMy Says:
2008-02-03 12:21:59
I upgraded my Dell Optiplex with NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 and Viewsonic VA2226w with a great difficulties, for the installation instructions are not applicable. However, at last I see all drivers in HardWare Device Management, and in Display it says "ViewSonic VA2226w Serices on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200."
The problem is that very often, the screen looks like a negative film rather than a solid photo. I do not play game, but I watch Video clips instead. The screen does not look or behave bettern than before when the video ram is merely 8MB, and the monitor driver is only MS plug and play.
The current memory of the system is SDRAM ECC 512B, that is the only weak point that may cause the problem. I will try to upgrade it into 1 GB to see whether the problem is still exist.