Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATE: Three months later (late Sept 2014) - I still love this monitor -- in fact, I just bought a second one so I can move the Thunderbolt display over and use it with my new MBP, so I will be connecting two of these to my mini. I have a Mac Mini (Late 2012, running Mavericks) -- I am using an Apple Thunderbolt display as my main display, (through the Thunderbolt port, of course,) and the BenQ monitor as my side monitor via the HDMI connector. (I mention this because there was a question about whether this display would work with a Mac Mini, so this review is mostly aimed at Mac users, although most of it probably applies to all users.) Overall, I'm pretty happy with this display - for the price, it has a nice picture, no missing pixels that I can see [your mileage may vary, of course,] and reasonably attractive glossy plastic black base, with tilt control. Things I really like about it: 1) It comes with NO power or status LEDs on the front; I hate monitors that blink at me when I'm trying to watch a movie. My previous monitor had an eye-searing blue power LED, you know, just in case the picture on my screen wasn't sufficient indication that the monitor was truly 'on.' (There is a dim green LED on the side when it is powered on, but because of the shape of the screen you have to crane your head around to the side to see it, which is as it should be, IMHO.) 2) it's almost exactly the same picture height as my Thunderbolt display (maybe 1/4" difference) which is a nice perq on a second monitor. 3) The combination of flicker-free display tech and a configurable 'blue-light reduction' feature really does reduce eye strain when using this monitor. Nice. There are a few things to be aware of: not necessarily problems, but you'll be happier if you know about them up front. 1) The monitor only comes with a 15-pin (VGA) D-Sub cable in the box, which is annoying in 2014 - you need to buy your own HDMI cable (you don't want to use this with the MiniDisplayPort->VGA adaptor, those adapters stink, and the colors will be crap) Fortunately, the cables are about $5 from Amazon Basics: (e.g.[...]) 2) The monitor does not seem to auto-detect which kind of cable is being used - at first this freaked me out, because my Mac detected a second display connected, but the monitor just showed a blank screen with an unhelpful 'no cable attached' warning, and I thought something was hosed, but once I manually selected the HDMI video input through the monitor's menu system, it worked fine. 3) The monitor has a 'low-blue-light' setting that's nice (e.g. to turn down the blues while reading a lot of text on the screen, reduces eyestrain) but once you turn it on (easy to do) it's tricky to turn completely off: there's one menu to select what percentage of blue-reduction you want, but to go back to no blue reduction at all, you have to go into 'Picture Advanced'->'Picture Mode' and re-select 'Standard'. (Then again, the default 30% reduction looks nice, so I may just leave it there.) 4) Audio: the device does support HDMI audio output to a headphone jack, but it has no speakers, and no microphone input; this is not a problem for me, but it's something to be aware of if this will be your main monitor. The headphone jack is rather inconveniently placed in the back, next to the video inputs, so it's fine for permanently connecting up some speakers, but you won't want to be frequently plugging and unplugging headphones into this jack. (Mac user note: you have to select the monitor as your primary audio output device in 'Sound' preferences to route the sound to the monitor; it's not automatic the way it would be if you plugged into the back of the Mac directly.) 5) The base *does* have tilt capability, but no swivel. On the other hand, the footprint of the base is almost round, so it's really not a problem to just rotate the monitor if you need it - this seems like a sensible cost-reduction.