Iiyama has long had a good name in the monitor market for quality displays, though often at slightly higher prices than its competitors. The 17-inch ProLite H431S continues in the quality vein, but also isn't that pricey.

What would you look for most in an LCD monitor? Picture quality, of course; adjustability, to be able to position the screen exactly where you want; versatility, to run it from just about any graphics card.

The ProLite H431S can connect to either analogue or digital video cards, as it has both 9-pin and DVI sockets on the back. We'd use the digital input if possible, as it cuts out two signal conversions.

Positional adjustment is excellent. As well as the normal tilt mechanism, you can swivel the screen from side to side and move it up and down on its counterbalanced mast of a stand. Move it up or down and it will stay wherever you leave it. That's not the end of the possible adjustments, though.

The monitor supports screen rotation, so you can view it in either landscape or portrait modes. If you want to recalculate a spreadsheet or watch a DVD, landscape mode gives you a good view of what you're doing, while for word processing, DTP or Web design, you can rotate the screen through 90 degrees to view a complete A4 page with ease.

There are twin speakers built into the bottom of the LCD panel surround, but, as with all audio from LCD monitors, they give pretty thin and unattractive sound. They're suitable for Windows alerts, but you wouldn't want to listen to music on them.

All of which brings us to picture quality, and this is where Iiyama excels. The screen, with its maximum (native) resolution of 1,280 x 1,028 pixels, is clear and bright, with a good colour balance.

We ran DisplayMate and looked at the greyscale quality and the colour swatches in two of its main benchmarks. The display reproduced all the greyscales without much problem and there was good colour balance, though with a slight drop-off in the blue registers.

There's a lot of hype surrounding the response times of LCD monitors, with some manufacturers claiming times down to 4ms, or even 3ms. While they may be able to achieve these times, for all practical purposes there's no real advantage. When you play 3D games or action movies, you won't be able to see any ghosting or other speed-related attributes on this 8ms monitor.

We checked out the prices for this display and compared them with a number of others from rival manufacturers. In general, even the cheapest brands were only around £30 less than this Iiyama display, while some big-name brands came out more expensive. Given the screen quality and feature set, the ProLite H431S turns out to be very good value.