[6 of 6 customers found this review helpful]

Hannspree 27.5" Widescreen Flat-Panel LCD HD Monitor Review

Great for better game accuracy

"This is the successor to the 281H so reviews you'd read there are the same or better for this model. I can't tell from the specs what the differences are - I think there are maybe 2 HDMI ports instead of 1 and maybe some other minor tweaks.

Correction to Best Buy's posting: the native resolution on this monitor is 1920 x 1200, not 1920 x 1080. The box says that and all the software is using the higher resolution as well.

I have had 21" Samsung monitors for a few years and was looking for a larger screen to improve accuracy in shooter games like Battlefield 2142. I looked at the 25.5" Samsung and this 27.5" (not really 28") monitor together, and like the picture on this one much better. The increase in vertical and horizontal size of an object is significant for games where you're trying to get a mouse pointer into an area quickly. So going from the 25.5" size to 27.5" size did seem worth it to me after I compared the two monitors physically.

This monitor is paired with a late-model Gateway PC with 3GB of memory and an nVidia 8800 GTX graphics card. So performance at 1920 x 1200 is excellent due to the graphics card. Definitely check to make sure your card will support the resolution before buying. If your card has a DVI output, don't worry - they give you the cable to do DVI to HDMI. Also, it's hard to imagine running VGA into a monitor this size.

I would echo what almost everyone said about the 281H - great picture, overly bright at stock setting which is 100%, very fast response with no ghosting in games (haven't tried movies). There were no bad pixels in this unit. So I'd be going on about the monitor except so many people have already said the same things.

I gave it a 4 instead of a 5 for two minor issues waiting to be resolved (just sent an email to Support). First, it is a brand-new model, and the Vista CD shipped with it is missing a file and the drivers didn't install. I went to the website to download the drivers, and that zip file is corrupted. This is maybe less important than it sounds since the monitor works fine with the stock Plug-N-Play driver that comes with Vista. I'm not even sure what the Hannspree driver will provide beyond the stock driver. But it's not correct yet so I ding them a bit for that.

The second issue is that the onscreen (hardware-driven) image settings menu for turning auto-scaling on and off is grayed out, along with the choices for moving the unscaled picture left or right, etc. My son wanted to play one game non-widescreen without stretching, and I haven't been able to do that yet because I can't force the monitor to go 1600 x 1200 actual, which would leave black bars on both sides of the image. All images are showing at 1920 x 1200. This may be something really simple to fix or may be some interaction between the monitor and the nVidia card. Hopefully Support will resolve this one for us.

If you buy this for widescreen gaming, make sure you look online for programs needed for some games to adjust the "Field of View" so you see more instead of just getting a stretched 4:3 picture. Battlefield 2142 looks and plays great with such a program installed.

It's phenomenal how much text a monitor like this can show compared to a smaller one. I fully expected to set my font size higher immediately because it would be unreadable for me. But I find the text perfectly readable at its small size so I haven't done this yet and may not. Obviously, playing with contrast and brightness has a huge impact on how well your eyes will work with the monitor. There is "XTune" software to help you set these items and others and save profiles for quick switches.

So with the exception of the scaling issue, I'm entirely satisfied with the monitor to date and I'm sorry I bought a 21" monitor about six months ago instead of a 281H. I do think this monitor will overwhelm some people, but if you're looking for size and lots of content onscreen, or increased gaming accuracy... wow! If you're in the intended market for this monitor, give it a serious look."