Not everyone wants a 30kg behemoth squatting on their desk, but for some users a quality high resolution display isn't a luxury, it's an essential tool for doing the job. These are the kind of people Mitsubishi is after with its new 22-inch Diamondtron NF tube, which is - no surprise - what you will find inside the Diamond Pro 2045u.

The weight of this monitor made itself felt on the stand, which was stable enough, and which rotated reasonably freely, but getting it to tilt was a struggle. Mind you, once in the required position, at least it stays there.

Round the back you find not one but two D-Sub inputs, so the monitor can be used with two hosts, perhaps a PC and a Mac in a DTP or design setup, or twin data feeds in a dealing room. In fact the lack of BNC inputs - the traditional choice for high-end graphics work - suggests that perhaps the dealing room rather than the engineering design department is where Mitsubishi is aiming this display, although this is only speculation.

There's also a powered USB hub integrated neatly into the cabinet itself, rather than the stand, offering three downstream and two upstream ports.

The setup controls contained in the OSD were gratifyingly numerous and comprehensive, with detailed geometry corrections extending to individual corner pincushion tweaking, and there were individual corner purity controls in the image setup section of the menu. You also get fingertip control over every aspect of the colour balance, so there isn't a lot that you can't do with this monitor.

The extra inch on the diagonal over the standard 21-inch tube doesn't really mean that you can go above the 1600 x 1200 resolution which is generally the upper limit for that tube size (although the display will handle a maximum of 2048 x 1536). Instead, the large diagonal serves to make the display elements - text, buttons, scrollbars and the like - that bit larger and easier to read or hit with the mouse, and the overall effect is of an improved 1600 x 1200 compared to what you see on a 21-inch screen.

The Diamondtron tube is a decent piece of work too, with crisp overall focus and good detail reproduction aided by a 0.24mm slot pitch, plenty of brightness, a fully flat and non-distorting surface and 85Hz vertical refresh support at 1600 x 1200.

As was noted at the beginning of this review, this sort of kit isn't for everyone. But if you do need high resolution and that extra bit of readability afforded by the larger tube size, the Diamond Pro is going to be worth checking out. It's a quality display offering users a slightly larger and more readable view of high resolutions than that offered by a standard 21-inch monitor.