Eizo FlexScan S2410W

At almost twice the cost of Philips’ LCD, Eizo’s FlexScan S2410W ought to be pretty nice. And in a lot of ways it is. The screen is a full inch and change bigger than the Philips’. And its black cabinet is more solidly built—stately, even. We’d like it a whole lot more if we could adjust the screen’s height via a conventional telescoping neck (like Philips’).

But the S2410W sports Eizo’s patented ArcSwing stand, so the screen moves up and down on a set of tracks embedded in the displays broad concave neck. The height maxes out at around 2.5 inches off the desk’s surface, and tilting the screen forward and back requires undue effort. It’s more unique than convenient. Same goes for the twitchy touch-sensitive OSD buttons on the front of the bezel. Bundled software lets you perform all the OSD functions with your mouse and keyboard, and lets you create and tweak settings profiles for various content.

In our DisplayMate evaluation, the S2410W produced an almost totally uniform dark screen, except for backlight seepage in the upper corners. In grayscales, we observed red, green, and blue hues throughout the steps, which indicates color-tracking inconsistencies among the RGB channels. And the extreme dark and light ends of the scales lacked distinction. Still, colors and contrast seemed pretty strong in most of our high-res test images, although some detail was lost in dark areas. This didn’t hobble the predominately dark scenes of Batman Begins, however, thanks to the screen’s Movie mode, which adjusts the saturation, contrast, and gamma, for a vibrant cinematic experience. In games, the environments looked colorful and bright, and the action was free of flaws.