HannStar HG216D
Products under the HannStar brand, a trademark of Hanns.G, feature low prices and a wide assortment. But as we learned earlier, most of the company’s 19” monitors differ but slightly. Moreover, Hanns.G offers just a few 22” models and doesn’t offer monitors larger than 22” at all.
The HG216D differs from the other monitors in this review with the screen diagonal in the first place. This difference doesn’t go further than the four tenth of an inch, though. The newer 21.6” matrixes are no different from the older 22.0” ones otherwise. It’s the same TN technology with all its pros and cons. It is just handier to cut the wafers into 21.6” pieces at some production lines and that’s the only reason why such monitors appeared.
The designers placed a black frame around the screen, probably to conceal the width of the front bezel and to increase the screen size visually. The monitor’s front panel is light-gray. The overall effect is rather negative: I was always catching myself thinking that the image was not just stretched out to full screen.
The stand allows adjusting the tilt of the screen. It can be removed and replaced with a standard VESA mount.
Another special feature of the HG216D is the lack of a DVI input. It has a HDMI connector instead. You won’t have to look for a graphics card with a HDMI output, though. A HDMI-DVI cable will solve the problem. Unfortunately, such a cable is not included with the monitor. The box contains a cable with D-Sub plugs for analog connections.
The sound (for the integrated speakers) is transferred to an ordinary line input across an appropriate cable.
The control buttons are placed in the bottom right of the front panel. Their labels are placed on the screen bezel and perfectly visible. The Power indicator is designed like a letter G inside a circle. It is highlighted with a blue LED – a rather too bright LED to my taste.
The onscreen menu is simple but quite user-friendly. It provides a usual selection of setup options (such as brightness, contrast, color temperature) without anything exceptional.
The monitor has 100% brightness and 70% contrast by default. I lowered the settings to 40% brightness and 50% contrast to achieve a 100nit white. You shouldn’t increase the contrast setting above 70% as it makes light halftones indistinguishable from white. The brightness is regulated by mean of the modulation of the power of the backlight lamps at a frequency of 240Hz.
Color gradients are reproduced well at any settings.
A subjective impression, I should note the low quality of image interpolation in non-native resolutions. If you need a monitor for games and your graphics card cannot deliver a playable speed at 1680x1050, the HG216D won’t be a good choice.
