Update: This popular deal is still available.
Dell has
24.5" Dell S2522HG 1080p 240Hz 1ms IPS FreeSync Monitor for
$149.99.
Shipping is free.
Thanks to community member
XianL4749 for finding this deal.
Specs: - Resolution: 1920x1080
- Refresh Rate: 240Hz
- Response Time: 1ms
- Panel Type: IPS
- G-Sync and FreeSync Premium Support
- Brightness: 400 cd/m²
- Viewing Angles: 178° H / 178° V
- VESA: 100mm x 100mm
- Ports
- 2x HDMI (ver 2.0)
- 1x DisplayPort (ver 1.2)
- 1x SuperSpeed USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) upstream port (rear)
- 2x SuperSpeed USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) downstream ports [Front bottom, one with BC1.2 charging capability at 2A (max)]
- 2x SuperSpeed USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) downstream ports (rear)
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First, in terms of value, there are no other 240hz or higher ips monitors of this size from reputable companies even close to this price. The fact it has no massively glaring issues as a 240hz monitor at $150 would be enough to recommend it even if its performance in various metrics (color, contrast, response time, etc.) were rather poor, however it actually performs quite well all around.
At 24.5 inches I consider this to be near ideal size for a 1080p pc monitor. This is somewhat subjective, but I personally consider anything below 24" as too small, while larger than 25", particularly 27" 1080p monitors, look too blurry and you can clearly see the individual pixels at a reasonable distance. I have had no issues with the pixel density or sharpness of the display, though that can be a matter of personal taste. It displays text fairly well with no glaring issues, though if you don't plan to game and only use your pc for productivity, you probably could get a similar experience from a $60 60hz office monitor on a good sale.
Continuing the theme of ergonomics, the stand that comes with this monitor is excellent, I've seen much more expensive monitors come with far worse. It is rather heavy and solidly constructed, and it allows the monitor to: be raised up and down, be swiveled left and right, be angled up and down, and be pivoted 90° to display in portrait mode. The monitor has a standard 100mm vesa mount, so if you wish to use your own stand or mount it to a wall you can easily do so.
I'll briefly touch on connectivity since the original post covers most of it, the hdmi 2.0 ports are sufficient for 240hz at 1080p, but if you want to use any form of vrr (variable refresh rate technology, such as gsync) over hdmi with a nvidia gpu it needs to be from the 16xx series or later. I've seen reviews indicating this monitor works with vrr from both the xbox and the playstation, though I have not tested this myself. Display port 1.2 is obviously more than sufficient for anything you might do at 1080p. The powered usb hub has worked without any issues, and is a nice addition. This monitor does not have any speakers, it only has audio pass-through, so don't try to set it as your sound device in windows and then wonder why you're not hearing anything. The monitor came with a power, hdmi, display port, and usb cable, all of which seemed to be of reasonable quality and worked without issue.
Moving on to the panel itself, there's lots to talk about. When using vrr the monitor can range from 48 to 240hz. The response times using dells grey to grey standard (whatever that is since companies are remarkably obtuse about giving any real data) are 1ms in "extreme" overdrive mode, 2ms in "super-fast" mode, and 4ms in "fast" mode. Unfortunately you only get those three options and can't fine tune it. Extreme overdrive mode is basically useless, it completely mangles the image quality of whatever is being displayed to a laughable degree. It only exists for dell to say the monitor has a 1ms response time, no one should ever actually use it. If you're willing to give up any semblance of image quality for a faster response time you should just get a tn monitor. Super-fast mode is usable, it produces rather sharp motion with barely any motion blur, but it suffers from fairly mild overdrive artifacts. I personally am very sensitive to overdrive artifacts, however I imagine most people would hardly notice them, and it strikes a reasonable balance between image quality and response time. Fast mode has slightly more motion blur than super-fast, but it has no overdrive artifacting of any kind, this is the mode the monitor is set to as default. Keep in mind, even with fast modes 4ms response time it can still change grey to grey at a higher rate than the 240hz refresh rate of the monitor, which is what's most important. This monitor does not support bfi (black frame insertion), but that can't be used with any form of vrr, plus it tanks the brightness of the monitor, so chances are you wouldn't want to use bfi anyways.
Moving on to image quality, this monitor has a 6bit panel with frc, making this monitor functionally have an 8bit bit depth. It covers 99% of the srgb color gamut and ~90% dci-p3. This is actually rather good for a gaming monitor and more than sufficient for gaming and content consumption, but if you plan to use this monitor for color sensitive productivity work such as photo or video editing it will likely prove insufficient. Out of the box, even after installing dells drivers and color profile, whites on this monitor have a slight yellowish tint, which I noticed immediately and has been pointed out by many other people. I just grabbed my near decade old colorimeter and adjusted the colors in matter of minutes, however if you don't have a colorimeter trying to adjust the colors by eye to remove that yellow tint might be challenging. Hopefully dell will release some type of update to address this, but until then I can only consider the factory default color settings as fairly poor. Once properly calibrated colors appear quite good, and I have no real complaints. The brightness and anti-glare coating are sufficient to use in a bright room without issue. This monitor is not hdr certified, however while there are several other 240hz+ monitors below $300 that are technically hdr certified, they lack the brightness, contrast, and color gamuts to actually display hdr in any meaningful way. At this price point the lack of hdr certification means pretty much nothing. As a side note, if you plan to connect this monitor over hdmi I recommend controlling this monitors color through your graphics cards control panel, since windows has a history of setting the color range to limited for monitors connected over hdmi.
With regards to static contrast, while the listed spec is 1000:1, some reviews of the panel indicate real world performance may be closer to 900:1. Low contrast is expected of an ips panel, and realistically speaking the difference between this monitor and a slightly better contrast ips panel would almost certainly be negligible to the average consumer. If you want better contrast you should not buy an ips monitor, but alternative panel technologies come with their own issues. Uniformity and ips glow are just about what you'd expect for a mid range monitor, at least on the unit I received, your particular unit may vary. The viewing angles are excellent, as expected from an ips monitor, so if you tend to look at your monitor from various angles for whatever reason it should serve you well.
Overall, if you are looking for a 1080p gaming monitor the s2522hg vastly outclasses any other monitor in its price range, and I highly recommend it. There are a couple other monitors that when on sale are in a similar price bracket, but they either use a different panel type such as va or tn with significant drawbacks, are a non-optimal size, and/or simply don't perform as well. At this price it's pretty much a no brainer, especially when you stack on a certain cashback site and whatever other offers may be available to you. If your primary use case for a monitor is productivity based rather than gaming you would likely be better served getting a 1440p or higher monitor with a lower refresh rate.
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I got about $30 Dell rewared this comes to me about $100
Thank You OP
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First, in terms of value, there are no other 240hz or higher ips monitors of this size from reputable companies even close to this price. The fact it has no massively glaring issues as a 240hz monitor at $150 would be enough to recommend it even if its performance in various metrics (color, contrast, response time, etc.) were rather poor, however it actually performs quite well all around.
At 24.5 inches I consider this to be near ideal size for a 1080p pc monitor. This is somewhat subjective, but I personally consider anything below 24" as too small, while larger than 25", particularly 27" 1080p monitors, look too blurry and you can clearly see the individual pixels at a reasonable distance. I have had no issues with the pixel density or sharpness of the display, though that can be a matter of personal taste. It displays text fairly well with no glaring issues, though if you don't plan to game and only use your pc for productivity, you probably could get a similar experience from a $60 60hz office monitor on a good sale.
Continuing the theme of ergonomics, the stand that comes with this monitor is excellent, I've seen much more expensive monitors come with far worse. It is rather heavy and solidly constructed, and it allows the monitor to: be raised up and down, be swiveled left and right, be angled up and down, and be pivoted 90° to display in portrait mode. The monitor has a standard 100mm vesa mount, so if you wish to use your own stand or mount it to a wall you can easily do so.
I'll briefly touch on connectivity since the original post covers most of it, the hdmi 2.0 ports are sufficient for 240hz at 1080p, but if you want to use any form of vrr (variable refresh rate technology, such as gsync) over hdmi with a nvidia gpu it needs to be from the 16xx series or later. I've seen reviews indicating this monitor works with vrr from both the xbox and the playstation, though I have not tested this myself. Display port 1.2 is obviously more than sufficient for anything you might do at 1080p. The powered usb hub has worked without any issues, and is a nice addition. This monitor does not have any speakers, it only has audio pass-through, so don't try to set it as your sound device in windows and then wonder why you're not hearing anything. The monitor came with a power, hdmi, display port, and usb cable, all of which seemed to be of reasonable quality and worked without issue.
Moving on to the panel itself, there's lots to talk about. When using vrr the monitor can range from 48 to 240hz. The response times using dells grey to grey standard (whatever that is since companies are remarkably obtuse about giving any real data) are 1ms in "extreme" overdrive mode, 2ms in "super-fast" mode, and 4ms in "fast" mode. Unfortunately you only get those three options and can't fine tune it. Extreme overdrive mode is basically useless, it completely mangles the image quality of whatever is being displayed to a laughable degree. It only exists for dell to say the monitor has a 1ms response time, no one should ever actually use it. If you're willing to give up any semblance of image quality for a faster response time you should just get a tn monitor. Super-fast mode is usable, it produces rather sharp motion with barely any motion blur, but it suffers from fairly mild overdrive artifacts. I personally am very sensitive to overdrive artifacts, however I imagine most people would hardly notice them, and it strikes a reasonable balance between image quality and response time. Fast mode has slightly more motion blur than super-fast, but it has no overdrive artifacting of any kind, this is the mode the monitor is set to as default. Keep in mind, even with fast modes 4ms response time it can still change grey to grey at a higher rate than the 240hz refresh rate of the monitor, which is what's most important. This monitor does not support bfi (black frame insertion), but that can't be used with any form of vrr, plus it tanks the brightness of the monitor, so chances are you wouldn't want to use bfi anyways.
Moving on to image quality, this monitor has a 6bit panel with frc, making this monitor functionally have an 8bit bit depth. It covers 99% of the srgb color gamut and ~90% dci-p3. This is actually rather good for a gaming monitor and more than sufficient for gaming and content consumption, but if you plan to use this monitor for color sensitive productivity work such as photo or video editing it will likely prove insufficient. Out of the box, even after installing dells drivers and color profile, whites on this monitor have a slight yellowish tint, which I noticed immediately and has been pointed out by many other people. I just grabbed my near decade old colorimeter and adjusted the colors in matter of minutes, however if you don't have a colorimeter trying to adjust the colors by eye to remove that yellow tint might be challenging. Hopefully dell will release some type of update to address this, but until then I can only consider the factory default color settings as fairly poor. Once properly calibrated colors appear quite good, and I have no real complaints. The brightness and anti-glare coating are sufficient to use in a bright room without issue. This monitor is not hdr certified, however while there are several other 240hz+ monitors below $300 that are technically hdr certified, they lack the brightness, contrast, and color gamuts to actually display hdr in any meaningful way. At this price point the lack of hdr certification means pretty much nothing. As a side note, if you plan to connect this monitor over hdmi I recommend controlling this monitors color through your graphics cards control panel, since windows has a history of setting the color range to limited for monitors connected over hdmi.
With regards to static contrast, while the listed spec is 1000:1, some reviews of the panel indicate real world performance may be closer to 900:1. Low contrast is expected of an ips panel, and realistically speaking the difference between this monitor and a slightly better contrast ips panel would almost certainly be negligible to the average consumer. If you want better contrast you should not buy an ips monitor, but alternative panel technologies come with their own issues. Uniformity and ips glow are just about what you'd expect for a mid range monitor, at least on the unit I received, your particular unit may vary. The viewing angles are excellent, as expected from an ips monitor, so if you tend to look at your monitor from various angles for whatever reason it should serve you well.
Overall, if you are looking for a 1080p gaming monitor the s2522hg vastly outclasses any other monitor in its price range, and I highly recommend it. There are a couple other monitors that when on sale are in a similar price bracket, but they either use a different panel type such as va or tn with significant drawbacks, are a non-optimal size, and/or simply don't perform as well. At this price it's pretty much a no brainer, especially when you stack on a certain cashback site and whatever other offers may be available to you. If your primary use case for a monitor is productivity based rather than gaming you would likely be better served getting a 1440p or higher monitor with a lower refresh rate.
You are the sort of SDer that makes this website worthwhile. Repped.
You are the sort of SDer that makes this website worthwhile. Repped.
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