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The U-23 is a 23in monitor with a 1,920×1,080 Full HD resolution, a good variety of inputs and a USB pass-through port. Unlike most monitors, it has a glass screen. Its glossy finish isn’t suitable for office environments with bright overhead lighting because the reflections will be distracting, but it brings out the best in the monitor’s colours. Like most monitor manufacturers, AG Neovo has a special name for its glass screen, but it’s really just that: a glass screen.
It’s not especially hardened, but it is more suitable for environments in which you might need a little extra protection, such as a household with young children who may poke holes in a normal screen. It also has an anti-reflective coating, but in practice it just coloured the reflections pink.
Its colours need a boost because they aren’t that accurate. Our colorimeter measured the U-23 at 88% of the sRGB colour space, and blues and greens didn’t look right. This caused a cold cast that made flesh tones seem a bit pallid. As a result, the U-23 isn’t ideal for watching movies. Most of our test images lacked vibrancy and seemed like they were shot on an overcast day. This meant that Casino Royale’s scenes in the Bahamas were robbed of the warm glow of the Caribbean sunshine.
You can use a calibration tool to rectify the colour or you can try your luck with the U-23’s menu. It uses touch-sensitive buttons, as is the trend these days, and they’re marked by simple arrows instead of self-explanatory icons, which initially prove confusing. The up or down arrows, for instance, open the menu, the right arrow selects an item while an odd windmill icon moves you back a level.
The menu itself is quite basic. You only get brightness, contrast and colour temperature controls, and the latter offers a choice of 5400K, 6500K, 9300K or User, which lets you control red, green and blue levels. It was hard to achieve the same results of our calibration by adjusting these values manually, but by setting red to 150, green to 140 and blue to 135, we managed to approximate them.
The problem is that the U-23 costs £200, and we don’t understand why. Parents might feel more secure knowing their kids can’t poke a finger through the screen, but it isn’t vastly more energy-efficient than other LED-backlit monitors and image quality isn’t anything near today’s IPS panels. The Viewsonic VX2336S-LED has superb image quality and only costs £120. Get that and keep the kids at a safe distance.
