Best computer monitor 2020: 4K, gaming and curved displays

Beautiful, crystal clear viewing is the order of the day with this powerful monitor. It is an aesthete’s dream, combining 4k Ultra HD resolution with a chic silver design that’s distinctly snazzier than the average monitor.

One minor downside is that assembling it can be a little fiddly. The screws used to put the stand together with the screen doesn’t fit into place quite as easily as we’d have liked. However, this minor inconvenience will soon be forgotten, once you’ve hooked up your computer or console and feasted your eyes on the phenomenal screen.

Super-simple to set up, easy to configure and HD capable, this is a solid affordable option for your home office.

The monitor’s 1920 x 1080px FHD resolution is more than sharp enough for most home use, although gamers and professionals who work with images and videos might be better served with a 4k screen instead. Its VGA and HDMI video inputs cover most of the devices you could likely wish to use with it, including some laptops of a pre-HDMI vintage.

Some of the EK240YAbi’s components are relatively lightweight, so do take care with them when moving the monitor around.

The Dell ultrasharp QHD monitor is simply glorious to view media with. This should come as little surprise given the monitor’s spec sheet. 1080p resolution, “comfortview” blue light reduction and top-drawer colour calibrations are just a few of the many strings to the U2719D’s bow.

In terms of design, this monitor is eminently practical, from the capability to stow away dangling cables using its cable management system, to the solid, straightforward style of the stand and screen. If we’re going to split hairs, we’d say the headphone jack could do to be slightly easier to locate. It’s quite hard to get to it behind the monitor stand, and you’ll need it to hear the audio from your connected device.

This screen gives you HD resolution in a remarkably affordable package. The monitor’s brushed finish and pleasingly simple design give it an appearance that’s a cut above most of its peers.

At 21.5″,  it is a suitable size to work with in a fairly compact space. If you want to use the monitor for gaming or watching films, you may want to find something a little larger.

Interestingly, this monitor can be wall mounted – a capability that opens up the potential to save lots of space on your desk.

Here’s a monitor so immersive, you can pretty well live inside it. The curved, 32″ screen looks cinematic, and it does indeed lend itself well to viewing films. But that flamboyant curvature can be beneficial in day-to-day office use, too. A curved screen can help the user take in all the information on a wide screen more easily than they could if the screen were flat – a claim we found to be accurate during our testing.

Curved screen aside, this is a fairly simple and effective HD monitor. One minor downside is that it is not especially connectable, with only HDMI, VGA and headphone inputs/outputs to play with.

This powerful monitor would be our recommendation to those of you who are looking to spend about £200. It ticks all the basics perfectly, with robust-feeling construction, excellent quality on the screen, and a neat footprint that takes up only a small circle of space on the desk.

Looking more in-depth, it has some clever tricks up its sleeve that help deliver an excellent viewing experience. The monitor uses dynamic backlighting to enhance the light and the dark on the screen, delivering the sort of colour contrast Caravaggio might well have enjoyed. It also enhances the outlines of objects on-screen to increase their sharpness. This is a monitor that’s very well attuned to how we see things – and what higher praise could we give it than that?

This natty Philips monitor stands out from the crowd, with a smart, angular design and attractive brushed finish.

Of course, what really matters is what’s on screen – and in this monitor’s case, that’s something rather impressive. It uses an ultra-wide colour spectrum to deliver especially vivid images. From screensavers to streaming videos, this can make for excellent viewing.

One group of users to whom this monitor comes especially highly recommended is casual gamers. It represents a great compromise between the needs of home office use – a neat footprint, a restrained design – with impressive specs such as a response time of four milliseconds.