HP v185ws

The v185ws is a new monitor from HP.  It has an 18.5'' 5 ms panel that uses TN display technology with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels in the 16:9 aspect ratio that movies are usually shot in. 

Its small size makes its principal market users who don't have much space on their desktop.

Basic Hardware

The v185ws only has the bare minimum.  For this price, we would have liked to have a wider choice of connectivity options.  At the back, there's just a single VGA port to connect your computer.  The stand is just as basic, and it doesn't allow you to pivot the monitor or adjust its height; all you can do is tilt the screen back.  The bezel follows the current trend of being glossy at the front and matte at the back.

Unlike the default colours, the default contrast ratio is rather weak compared to other monitors we've tested.  It only reaches a maximum of 700:1 thanks to blacks which are less than deep.


Colours: A pleasanst surprise

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

Overall, the factory settings for colours are about right.  Our measurements indicated a deltaE score of 3.3, but that doesn't mean that this monitor is perfect.  It has a slight tendency to produce blue shades for lighter colours and red shades for darker colours.  This little problem makes it impossible to improve the performance, but very few people will be able to notice the very small variation.

Response Time: Demanding gamers should stay away

Coloured    Transparent
Average ghosting over ten frames

As we've seen, the v185ws uses what is a very standard panel for an LCD computer monitor.  It uses TN technology and has a grey-to-grey response time of 5 ms, which we couldn't see any problems with during our tests.  It's not quite good enough to keep movements fluid in FPS games where you're running, jumping and shooting in every direction, but if you prefer calmer games, then you shouldn't have any problems--as long as you don't mind playing on such a small screen, of course.