Philips Brillance 225B1C

The 225B1C sits on a height-adjustable stand that rotates from side to side and has built-in speakers, a headphone jack and a USB port to make it easy to connect peripherals to your computer.  You have the choice between using DVI and VGA as your video input.

It's not often that we see such flexible monitors.  The only hitch is that, as is often the case, this is a monitor that uses a TN panel with a 5 ms response time, which reserves it mostly for office use. 

Gaming

Coloured    Transparent
Average ghosting over ten frames

Sometimes, 5 ms monitors provide a pleasant surprise and are actually pretty fast, but that isn't the case with 2251BC.  There aren't any specific concerns, but it's just not responsive enough to fluidly render movements.  On the other hand, it's perfectly adapted to office use, as well as some games like strategy or sports titles.  For other types of games, which involve fast movements, you'd do better to consider faster screens like the Samsung SyncMaster 2253rz.  On average, the input lag is under two frames.  That means it won't have any impact on your multi-player gaming.

Colours

Default Colours

Ideal Colours

The raw scores measured using our equipment seem relatively close to what we'd expect.  With an average discrepancy of just 3.5 between the colours displayed on screen and those requested by the graphics card, you could be led into believing that the screen is well-configured by default.  Unfortunately, however, there are a number of problems that mean this isn't the case.  The colour discrepancies aren't spread out evenly and the gamma is poorly adjusted.

The good news is that this problem is easily solved by using the OSD to adjust the gamma to 2.0, which actually sets it to a steady 2.2, and that does a lot to reduce the red dominance mentioned above.

Contrast (xxx:1)	Black (cd/m²)
100 cd/m²  200 cd/m²	100 cd/m²  200 cd/m²

Changing this one setting gains this monitor an extra star: it's worth four stars set up this way.

If you're a regular reader of our monitor tests, you might already know that these products aren't always the best choice for displaying video.  The problem is due to the absence of image correction electronics, and so on the 225B1C, like other monitors, the quality of the upscaling will depend entirely on your video source.