It’s only now that widescreen TFTs have broken the 21” viewable barrier that I’m finding them to be of a compelling size. Your thoughts may differ, but when you see this on your desk you’ll appreciate that its widescreen nature belies a bigger screen real estate than you’d expect given its physical dimensions. The native resolution of 1650 x 1080 means that there aren’t a whole lot of games to natively support it, but the ever handy www.widescreengamingforum.com soon helped us get all of our faves running in the desired resolution.

Perhaps it’s because we’ve also got the graphical grunt to run our games smoothly at these resolutions that I’m now ready to make the switch – there’s no need to run the 215TW at lesser, scaled resolutions if you’ve got a nice SLI setup. Which is for the best, as scaled graphics still look disappointingly blurred compared to the native resolution. The dot pitch of 0.270mm means that even when I had the monitor a mere 50cm or so from my face (my preferred yet definitely unhealthy viewing distance whilst gaming), picking out individual dots wasn’t easy.

After firing up DisplayMate, it became apparent that the image quality was extremely good. It passed through every test with flying colours, allowing us to get past these boring tests rapidly, and right into the good stuff – gaming and DVD viewing! BF2 looked superb, and the 8ms response time took care of any ghost concerns. Watching a DVD showed the flaws in the source material, rather than any inadequacies of the screen.

Throw in an excellent warranty as well as a not too shabby asking price, and the 215TW is one of the finest 21” widescreen monitors in its class.