GCN Lab Review: HP LP2475w LCD monitor
Connecting state and local government leaders
The HP LP2475w is a good all-around 24-inch LCD with few flaws but little to offer in terms of major strengths. It should perform well in most office situations.
Pros: Good viewing at all angles, best with low saturation colors, many ports
Cons: Poor display of darker images, reds are just a bit off
Image quality: B+
Features: B
Value: B-
Price: $569
In this GCN Lab review:
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Eizo FlexScan EcoView EV2411W LCD monitor
Acer B273HU LCD monitor
NEC MultiSync EA241WM LCD monitor
Dell UltraSharp 2709W LCD monitor
HP LP2475w LCD monitor
The HP LP2475w is a good all-around 24-inch LCD with few flaws but also little to offer in terms of major strengths. It should perform well in most office situations.
The monitor is rich in ports, which should help it to drop into almost any setup from a normal monitor to a dedicated display for a DVD player. There are two DVI-I, an HDMI, component video and S-Video ports. There is also a six-port USB hub as icing on the cake.
To make the monitor a little greener, you can set up sleep schedules for the screen independent of whatever operating system is running the device. You can even use the monitor’s controls to automatically activate sleep mode at prescribed times if it’s attached to a dummy device, such as a VCR or DVD player. That way you won’t be wasting energy if nothing is being displayed.
The image quality of the HP LP2475w is good but not great. Its best feature is accuracy in displaying low-saturation colors. Very subtle colors look great when placed over a white background. When colors are stepped down over a large 64-stop grid, they are easy to distinguish even if they are similar to one another.
The screen is also fairly uniform, which helps with fine detail display. We recorded an average of 240 lumens in the middle of the screen and 200 lumens in the corner. The naked eye won’t notice any differences. The screen also is readable at almost any angle in front of the screen, which might be important if you have a lot of people gathered around.
Text is readable at 10 points with only slight distortion. At 12 points, text is perfect.
Color accuracy with the HP LP2475w is good, with greens and blues coming the closest to their actual colors. Reds are a bit off, with just enough purple mixed in to make them appear a little rosy.
The HP LP2475w does a bad job trying to display really dark images on a black background. Even if you tweak the monitor to get this right, others in this review can beat it natively.
The HP LP2475w is a solid monitor. Its independent sleep controls and numerous ports make it perfect to hook up to devices such as DVDs to display video without wasting energy. As a straight LCD monitor, it’s not too bad, achieving good marks in most areas.
Hewlett-Packard, 800-474-6836, www.hp.com