HP x2301 23-Inch Micro Thin LED Monitor
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- Micro thin design saves space
- Sophisticated, eye-catching looks
- Full HD 1920 X 1080 resolution
From editing home videos to creating business documents, everything looks better on the full HD, high-performance HP x2301 Micro Thin LED Monitor. This 23-inch diagonal LED monitor delivers dazzling images, and its striking translucent base with brushed anodized aluminum accents looks great in home or office. This HP monitor also saves on space with its ultra thin profile and features tilt adjustment for a comfortable view. The HP x2301 Micro Thin LED Monitor with BrightView technology has an 8,000,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio and supports Full HD 1920 X 1080 resolution. It also has VGA- and HDCP-supported DVI-D and HDMI connectivity. LED backlights provide quicker “switching” time and faster performance and a 3ms GtG response time helps reduce blur and ghosting. This LED monitor also helps reduce environmental impact – it’s ENERGY STAR 5.0 qualified and has mercury-free LED backlighting to reduce environmental impact. It also features arsenic-free display glass and recyclable plastics
HP Monitor
HP x2301 23-Inch Micro Thin LED Monitor
List Price: $ 249.99
Price:
Great monitor, especially for video. And it looks COOL!,
Brief Description:
This is a 23″, 7lb monitor (actual diagonal measurement 23″) with a tiltable (-5 to +15 deg) screen. It has a inputs for VGA, DVI and HDMI, and the input can either be auto-switched or user-selected. The auto-switch seemed to work fine with one active input- I never tried it with two active at the same time.
The front panel contains the usual power on button and the menu and selection buttons-but the backlights can be disabled! One less annoying little LED that is always on. There are no other ports of any type.
The monitor looks cool! It is very thin-maybe slightly less than half the thickness of a deck of cards and has a nice dark grey/black finish that seems to resist fingerprints somewhat. The base is fairly small, and the monitor appears top-heavy. It doesn’t fall over, but I’d be careful about bumping it. Since I live in an earthquake zone, I’ll probably figure a way to secure it so it can’t fall over.
The Good Points
This is one of the fastest refreshing monitors I have seen. I have a few videos that are full of fast changing screens of unrelated colors, and this screen did a very nice job of minimizing blur and slow switching between frames. I doubt if you will see any problems on typical video.
The monitor backlight is very bright, and the colors are vivid. Text shows up well, and with good contrast to ease the strain on the eyes…something that gets a little more important every year. Black shows up as a very dark charcoal color-close enough to black for most purposes. This is not uncommon as no LCD can really display true black.
The controls are awesome. You can adjust brightness, contrast, color temp, individual RGB levels, enable/disable light sensor and auto adjust, clock and clock phase, horizontal and vertical position, image fill, sharpness, dynamic control rate (sort of a auto white-balance), on-screen control panel positioning, and auto adjust. There is also the full complement of power-off and sleep mode controls.
The auto adjust seems to do a very credible job of setting up the monitor for color and brightness. I created a custom profile with a colorimeter, which was not too far off the default, except for brightness.
The autosensor for room brightness seems to work well, giving the monitor consistent performance in bright or dark rooms. The monitor backlight is able to provide enough illumination for even brightly lit (sunshine) rooms.
The image on the screen is viewable from just about 180 degrees.
The driver software seemed well behaved under Windows7.
The unit ships with a DVI and VGA cable, but no HDMI cable. The power cord uses a standard plug and an inline transformer, so no wall-wart to deal with. The transformer accepts 100-240v, so you can take it traveling.
The Not-So-Good Points
Reflected glare off the front of the screen is annoying. While this screen seems to be about average, there are other monitors on the market with much better anti-reflective coatings.
As with most monitors, it is quite brightly lit, which can be a problem for creating photo images for printing.
The manual (softcopy only) is less sophisticated than the monitor. There are numerous controls on the monitor (e.g. clock phase) that are probably not commonly understood by a typical buyer. The manual is not much help, other than stating that the control may govern the sharpness. Sure, you can google away and understand these sorts of things, but it would have been nice if the documentation was a little more complete.
Summary:
This is a really nice monitor for either every day use, or especially for video applications because of its fast refresh rates. Serious photographers will find the usual limitations on true color reproduction and brighness, but that describes 90% of the monitors on the market. The anti-glare coating could be a little better, but that can be compensated for by careful placement. It is a very sleek looking piece of equipment, and looks good in a professional office setting.
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|Very good monitor for text and graphics,
I have a MacBook Pro and I wanted to add a monitor to it. My primary use is for text and sharp graphics (the display of music editing software, like GarageBand, which shows images of waveforms, etc. I went to a store and had the sales associate put on a web page that had the text and lines that were a realistic test for my use since the usual display was of photographs. I do not play games on my computer, nor use it as a TV. Photo editing is a secondary use. I learned that most of the monitors there had an anti-glare surface, which is a basically a rough surface on the display which does two things: it causes light that is reflected in the room to be diffusely reflected from the screen, and, it also reduces the sharpness, slightly but noticeably, of the image because you are viewing the image not through a smooth surface, but a rough surface, which causes the light, both reflected and transmitted (through it) to be diffused. The down side to a smooth (glossy) surface monitor screen is that reflections in the room are sharp and can interfere with the image you are viewing. However, if you can control the light in your workplace, as I can, this is not a problem. You can just turn down or off the lights in the room, and position or arrange the lights and/or the monitor so that reflections are not a problem.
There were only a couple smooth screen surface monitors, one of them was the HP x2301. Its display looked about as good as the others, but when I had the sales associate feed a web page display, a typical web page with a mixture of text, lines, boxes and graphics, the HP x2301 looked very sharp compared to the others. I bought one (for only $189 directly from the HP web site, using a discount coupon from one of the many online coupon web sites and I am very happy with it. One of the reviews from a tech web site mentioned that the display has a greenish cast to it, and I found this to be true, however by making a custom color configuration of Red: 172, Green: 152 and Blue: 255 I was able to get excellent color balance, just as good as the Mac’s display, which is very good. I prefer a more cool color balance, I like the white’s totally “white”, but so you may want just a little more Red and Green than the amounts I have specified here.
One other downside to the HP x2301 is the viewing angle performance. The color balance changes with just a slight (~15 or 20 degrees) off center. For a single person viewer, this is not a problem, however I must keep directly aligned with the center of the monitor or the color goes wacky (becomes yellowish). I cannot comment on the game response of the monitor, but its spec is 3 msec, so specwise that is great, but it is not a 120 Hz monitor, which gamers prefer. I have watched online, streaming video, and it looks fine, but I cannot comment on how it would do with full HD video from a DVD, for example. For $189 I am VERY happy.
The newer IPS technology monitors get high reviews, and I believe they provide a wider viewing angle, however, for my uses, the HP x2301 was greatly superior to any that I saw. I believe that the smooth screen surface was an important factor, perhaps the key factor. I have read that the smooth, non-antiglare screen have a “perceived” improvement in contrast, which I believe is a misleading statement. The improvement is in sharpness, not contrast, and it is not just perceived, the image IS sharper since it isn’t viewed through an anti-glass screen which diffuses the light reducing the actually sharpness and clarity of the image. This diffusion effect may actually be experienced as a positive effect by some people since causes the granularity of the individual pixels to be reduced producing an optical dithering effect. This probably an advantage for watching movies, but as I mentioned, for my purposes, I need the sharpest images possible.
Build quality seems fine. It has three connectors: VGA, DVI and HDMI, which is nice. The monitor itself is superthin, which might be an advantage for mounting it on a wall, but for use on a stand, that doesn’t seem to matter. The stand is short, so you put it on some books or something if you like the monitor at eye level, as I do.
The bottom line is that I recommend spending a lot of time comparing monitors with your own eyes and especially viewing the types of images that you will be viewing. Even then, the display will probably look a little different in your home or office environment and with your computer. For the uses I have specified, I think the HP x2301 is the best monitor and you would probably have to spend perhaps five times as much, perhaps for an Apple Cinema display, for example, to obtain better performance. I’m using it to write this review, and the image is sharp, very sharp. I brought up some photos, and the color looked excellent. I am very happy with this monitor. Good luck!
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|Outstanding Performance that Replaces a 3 Month Old Samsung,
Just when you think things can’t get too much better in a short period of time, you are proved wrong. In this case, I had just purchased a Samsung 21.5 inch monitor three months ago and thought the picture was crisp, the response time was fast, and the unit was small and thin.
I was wrong: this HP 23 inch monitor is 100% better than the Samsung. With a contrast ratio of 8 million to 1, a 3 ms response time (5 ms for the Samsung), 9.8 mm thick, and weighing what seems like a few ounces this is an awesome monitor.
Comparing the user experience against a couple of games I play, the pictures were much more crisp and I didn’t realize how much I was missing earlier until playing them on the HP monitor. The screens refreshed and were displayed a heck of a lot faster and in greater detail.
But it just wasn’t the games, which were nice, but the real benefit for me was being able to see letters in email and Word and Excel a lot crisper. Staring at a computer screen for hours on end like we all seem to do can be tiresome. After having this monitor hooked up now for over 24 hours, my eye strain after a long afternoon isn’t nearly what I am used to having.
I also tried a few minutes of a DVD movie on here (Star Wars IV) – while the space scenes were really neat, I usually don’t watch movies on my computer and didn’t have much of a point of referece. It was nice, but not what I really look for in a computer monitor.
Touching on the monitor size perspective, I am impressed with how thin it is. They get there by rather than attaching the power cord, etc. to the back of the monitor – and making the monitor’s thickness go up – everything is attached to the base. While that makes the base a little bigger or thicker than other monitors’comparable bases, to me it is really a plus: it makes the monitor’s base more stable. HP uses a power adapter for your “normal” cord, which then converts to a smaller plug that goes into the monitor’s base as well as the HDMI / DVI / VGA video connection to your computer. That’s it.
There is also a pretty cool feature where you can tilt the monitor forward or backward to match how I typically slouch at the computer.
Speaking of the cords and the monitor’s base, your video input can be HDMI, DVI-D, or a regular VGA cable. In the box comes a DVI and VGA cable, but no HDMI cable. While I realize HDMI cables are expensive, and including one would increase the monitor cost, it is a little annoying not to have one included. This is really a picky point as to me there really isn’t a difference in video capabilities between HDMI and DVI. As there are no speakers hooked up to the monitor (thank goodness) where the audio capability of HDMI is superior to DVI, this is a moot point and more of an annoyance factor.
I don’t think you can go wrong with this monitor: I have officially replaced my three-month old Samsung monitor with this superior HP – anyone want to buy the Samsung to take it off of my hands?
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