The monitor itself looks sharp, too sharp. The super glossy bezel will pick up reflections of backlit keyboards and other light sources in a dark room, which can be slightly distracting. While the matte screen itself is great for use in a brightly lit room, the glossy bezel will pick up all kinds of reflections. The bezel looks great, but makes the screen look worse.
And it makes the ugly stand even uglier by contrast. The Stand is perfectly round, which gives it a huge footprint, has a glossy edge, and a matte surface that looks like a record due to the inscribed circles of shrinking diameter. The glossy edge picks up glare (though not as much as the bezel) and the grooves pick up and hold every bit of detritus that finds its way across your desk where you can't get at it, but every one can see it.
The stand doesn’t have height or rotation adjustment, but you do get tilt, which is the important one. You can always raise a monitor with a book underneath it.
The picture adjustments and on screen display are what you would expect, plus a Splendid mode, which allows you to quickly switch between different modes for different purposes. I didn’t find these all that useful. They don’t magically make the picture better, but they do offer some presets you can switch between that can help if you’re in a room where the light conditions change a lot. I used the Nvidia Control Panel’s setup wizard and did a bit of tweaking with it for best results.
The very matte screen is great for cutting glare in an office environment. More importantly, the size is really a blessing. Increasing resolution allows you to get more on the screen, but increasing size means it won’t shrink to illegibility. The 25.5” size is perfect for the 1920x1200 resolution at an average to slightly long working distance. Over two feet away, you can get a shocking amount of stuff up, and still be able to read it.
The screen shot has of course been shrunk to fit in a window, but you can imagine having a full sized webpage, some Excel, a TweetDeck, and Skype open at the same time. All that with a three line task bar. An overhead light might pick up on the aforementioned super glossy bezel, which is the only thing that can dent this screen’s office appeal.
The most overwhelming quality you will notice is what a few inches will do for your level of immersion. Playing Lord of the Rings Online with the same graphics as on a twenty inch monitor, the world doesn’t look more real, but you see so much more of it. The monitor has excellent response time and there was no blur or ghosting going on.
Call of Duty: World at War was also a treat. The ability to make out enemies at a greater distance was obviously a plus, and despite this game’s break-neck pace, there was again no problem with the fast motion.
Grays did not look very distinct, and blacks aren’t all that black, which was a small problem in darker game environments. Luckily, games keep you moving fast enough that the bezel glare wasn’t noticeable.