It’s amazing just how much you can improve your everyday interaction with your PC by upgrading its monitor.

Switch from an old CRT monitor to a good-quality LCD panel, for instance, and text and graphics will look instantly sharper.

Plus you get to claim back all that desk space your old screen has been sitting on all these years.

At 21in, corner to corner, and a high resolution of 1600 x 1200 pixels, the ViewSonic VP2130b offers a whole lot of screen for a fairly competitive price.

It’s compatible with both PCs and Macs and comes with many useful extra features. There’s a built-in USB hub, for example, offering four easy-access USB ports behind the screen.

It has both analogue (VGA) and digital (DVI) video inputs, which means that it’s possible to connect two PCs at once, should you so wish, and switch between them using the panel’s simple on-screen display controls.

A useful software configuration utility called PerfectSuite provides a higher-than-average level of control over settings such as contrast, brightness and colour temperature and includes a special calibration wizard.

It can also detect when you pivot the screen, switching the display automatically from horizontal to vertical as you do so.

Most importantly of all, the ViewSonic VP2130b is easy on the eye, both in terms of its pleasing no-nonsense outward styling and its sharp, rich display image with an extremely wide viewing angle and virtually no motion blur, even on movies.

One minor complaint is that the monitor has a slightly larger footprint than we’d have liked. This is partly due to the clever pivot/swivel/tilt/height mechanism round the back of the screen.

The VP2130b won’t sit flush against the wall like some monitors, but it’s a lot easier to adjust the screen’s position to suit your own specific viewing needs.

If you’ve got a spare £700 and you’re in the market for a new monitor, it’s unlikely you’ll be disappointed by the VP2130b. And it’s reassuring to know that ViewSonic’s revised returns policy means that you won’t get any argument if you happen to find even a single pixel out of place.

Also consider
Belinea 10 20 30W 
The Belinea 10 20 30W is a high-quality LCD flat-screen monitor with great specifications at a £48 saving over the premium version, but it lacks a DVI port
Rating: 4/5
Price: £320