Use to be so good.. (Yuraku YV24WBH1)

Member Name: Wheelchair-Wiz

Product:	Yuraku YV24WBH1
Date:	18/02/09 (179 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: If you bought 10 month ago, an absolute cracking monitor at a bargain price.

Disadvantages: Yuraku have changed the innards, you don't get what I just reviewed.

I bought this Yuraku YV24WBH1 monitor over 10 months ago. Up until that point I was using an old 21" Dell CRT monitor, which I was really sad to see go.

Many gamers will have heard the rumours and stories of LCD's being worse for gaming than CRT monitors, this information is what held me back for so long from buying my first LCD. I was truly afraid of spending £200 or more on a monitor that would have less colour definition and brightness compared to a monitor I bought several years ago.

Of course the advantages of an LCD over are CRT are obvious, size and weight are among the main reasons most people upgrade. For me though it was more about getting something that was worth £200 or more, size and weight being excluded from the equation. I was/am a gamer and I spend a lot of time on my computer, if I was going to upgrade my monitor I wanted to make sure that every aspect of it was better.

So I set about a mission to find the best monitor at the cheapest price. Now many of you will think that this is silly, monitors quality scale with price or at least that is what we are suppose to believe.

Now many of you may not know this, some of you will. The panels inside LCDs use different technology; keeping it simple you have:

TN (twisted nematic) - this is your Volkswagen Beetle of monitors. Works fine, but designed for price rather than quality.

IPS (in-plane switching) - this is your Mercedes Benz of monitors. Designed for photographers, photo printer works, etc. The colours are true but the cost of manufacturer is high.

MVA (multi-domain vertical alignment) - this is your Nissan Micra of monitors. This panel was designed to be a compromise between price and quality with the hopes of taking over from TN.

Now obviously I am no monitor expert and what I know I have learnt from reading forums, Wikipedia, and many other websites. There are many other panel types, but from my understanding they are all off-shoots of what I have said above.

The basics are that TN have bad viewing angles, meaning if you look at your monitor from an angle, the colours all go weird. IPS panels are amazing, the colours are perfect and so are the viewing angles. MVA is the middle-ground, better viewing angles, better contrast but nowhere near as good as an IPS panel.

So I decided to look specifically for monitors that are either MVA or IPS but are within my price range. Problem is IPS monitors are generally £800 or more, and MVA are around £400 or more at the time I was looking. This is when I found the Yuraku, a cheap monitor which should be using a TN panel but was actually using an MVA panel... How did this slip through the net?

To be honest, I have no idea how this happened or how it happens. My guess is they buy a heap of panels from the panel manufacturers such as AU Optronic, based on the best they can get at that price. Then create the mount for it, the casing, bundle it with some cables and a nice box, then sell it. Basically, Yuraku do not make the monitor they merely make the shell it comes in and the technology behind it they buy elsewhere.

So for some reason, they managed to get a massive batch of AUO panels that were MVA at a decent price and started selling them for TN prices to us, the consumer. I will be honest here; the build quality of this monitor (not the panel) is absolutely pathetic. It is plastic, flimsy and generally looks good from a distance, but if you touch it the monitor almost falls over, the stand is truly abysmal.

The quality of the build truly doesn't bother me. After all, I could have easily bought a TN panel with the same outer shell with a worse panel for the same price. I complain about the shell of this monitor because it is the only thing that separates it from being a 100% bargain, but there must be sacrifices somewhere.

Unfortunately though, it appears that the manufacturers of the Yuraku monitor have run out of these MVA panels and started to put in TN panels. With the same flimsy build quality of the monitor and the lack of the excellent panel, this is not a bargain any more.

I am not going to rate this monitor based on my opinion, as clearly if you bought it today it would be very different from the one I have. So I guess it would be misleading to put that you would recommend this to a friend when you know they will get a monitor that is completely different.

This is where the problem lies, reviews are only accurate at the time of writing and things can change for the better and for the worse. Many manufacturers do not change their specifications although deep down inside the product they are selling, things have changed dramatically.

So if you can get an MVA Yuraku 24" monitor, I would tell you to do it. This is a brilliant monitor at a very cheap price. If you are not sure and you could end up with a TN panel instead, then I will tell you to do some research like I did.

Summary: There are still bargains out there if you look hard and put the time in.

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