The monitor has 90% brightness and 50% contrast by default. I achieved a 100nit level of white by lowering both to 46%. Color gradients are displayed without banding. When the contrast level is 25% or lower, darks become indistinguishable from pure black. When it is 65% or higher, there are problems with lights. Thus, you can only regulate the contrast setting from 25% to 65%. The brightness is regulated by means of pulse-width modulation of the backlight lamps at a frequency of 217Hz.

The white brightness shows good uniformity: an average of 3.5% and a maximum of 13.2%. Notwithstanding the small numbers, you can note the X-shaped pattern on the screen. The numbers are higher for black: an average deflection of 6.7% with a maximum of 19.5%. Of course, the bright X-shaped pattern is conspicuous on a black background.

The gamma curves are very good at the default settings, lying close to the theoretical one. The green curve is somewhat different, but not too much.

The curves are still very close to the theoretical one at the reduced settings. The green curve gets closer to the others while the blue curve betrays a certain distortion in the area of darks. This can hardly be noticed with a naked eye, though.

The color temperature setup is good, too. There is a wide choice of modes for you to pick up what suits you best. The color temperature varies but little between the levels of gray – within 700K (except for the User mode which is actually meant for manual adjustment). The difference is within 350K in the most popular Normal mode.

The color gamut is standard: larger than sRGB in greens and smaller in reds.

The response time average is 13.3 milliseconds (GtG) with a maximum of 24.3 milliseconds. This is good enough for an RTC-less TN matrix. Unfortunately, response time compensation is quite a rare feature even in newest monitors.

The contrast ratio is acceptable, never lower than 200:1 and reaching above 400:1 at the peak. That’s good for this matrix type.

Now let’s see what we have in the factory-set Senseye+Photo modes.

It’s all right in terms of contrast and brightness, although the Movie mode might be even brighter. Unfortunately, there is one problem about this feature. In every mode the image becomes exceedingly sharp, producing white outlines around dark objects. You may be familiar with such visual artifacts if you have used the Unsharp Mask filter in Adobe Photoshop.

Color reproduction worsens in the Movie and Photo modes. The curves are not so neat in the Movie mode. In the Photo mode, which is expected to produce colors with near-ideal precision, the value of gamma is too low, the level of contrast is too high, and the blue curve deflects too much from the others.

The new model from BenQ is quite a success overall. The E900WA has a nice appearance, offers good color reproduction and is free from obvious defects. If you are looking for a monitor to do some basic graphics processing on and can put up with a slow matrix, you may want to consider this model. Its only real problem is the small viewing angles typical of any TN matrix, but you have no choice of the matrix type among 19-inch widescreen models.

Highs:

• Nice exterior design
• Good color reproduction setup

Lows:

• No digital interface
• Slow matrix

Recommended usage:

• Text-based applications (documents, spreadsheets, Internet)
• Movies and games that don’t require a fast matrix
• Simple processing of graphics and photographs