BenQ GW2490C monitor review: a budget 24-inch monitor that's a USB-C bargain

The BenQ GW2490 was a great budget monitor. It partnered a basic Full HD panel with good image quality and some useful features. The new GW2490C retains everything we liked about the GW2490 – mostly its price and decent image quality – and adds a USB-C input as well as an upgraded 144Hz panel. On paper, that looks like a great recipe for a budget business monitor.

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BenQ GW2490C monitor: Design & Features

It's worth knowing that the GW2490C is one member of a small family. This model upgrades the old GW2490, but you can now also find the GW2490TC, which adds a height-adjustable stand and the ability to supply 20W of USB-C power delivery for about £20 more. As we'll explain later, our recommendation is to pick whichever is selling for the most appealing price.

The GW2490C makes do with a simple plastic stand with 25 degrees of tilt. The stand is a touch wobbly, but it's not terrible. There is a standard VESA 100 x 100mm mount at the rear, too, which gives you the option to use a monitor arm instead.

Around the back, you get one HDMI input, one DisplayPort input, and one USB-C input, which supports DisplayPort Alt. There's no power delivery here, though, and no USB hub. Still, it's nice to see that there's a 3.5mm headphone output – you'll want to use this as the tinny pair of internal speakers are best kept for emergency usage. It's also good to find that BenQ has used rear-facing ports, as this makes it far easier to slot cables in – and especially so in hot-desking scenarios where the cables often go walkabout. It's a shame that there's no cable management clip, though.

It's also worth reiterating that the USB-C port only supplies a small amount of power. With little more than 7.5 watts at its disposal, our laptop did show that it was connected to a power source, but it discharged faster than it could charge. With the laptop closed, however, it does trickle charge very slowly.

The on-screen display and controls are simple and well thought out. The buttons are all mounted under the panel's front edge, and the power button is backlit so you can tell when the monitor is plugged in or in standby mode. A little clickable four-way joystick navigates through the menus, and a further blue button toggles the automatic brightness sensor and automatic colour temperature settings on and off – you simply press the button, and it cycles through the various modes quickly.

Click the joystick, and a little mini menu lets you quickly switch between picture profiles, adjust brightness, dial up the low blue light mode, adjust the volume, or switch between the three video inputs. Scroll to the bottom of the mini menu, and you can access the full menu.

The main menus offer little more than useful day-to-day adjustments – you can't adjust contrast, RGB values, or fiddle with settings to subtly tweak the image quality. That's no bad thing, though. Instead, you can toggle the various Visual Optimiser settings, adjust the display to compensate for red or green color deficiency, and enable or disable features such as FreeSync, as well as cycling through the three overdrive modes.

BenQ GW2490C monitor: Display quality

No one is expecting miracles from a 24in Full HD monitor, but the GW2490 puts in a solid showing. Subjectively speaking, you will notice the drop in text clarity and image detail if you've spent any time with a 27in QHD monitor or any display with a higher pixel density. But that's not to say that the GW2490C is bad: it produces a very usable image for both productivity and entertainment duties.

It's nice to have a black and white ePaper mode for reading – this softens the white background to a warm pale sepia, which is much more comfortable for working on documents. We found it useful for reading, editing, and typing out this review under low-light conditions. It's easy on the eye after a long day.

For pure productivity, the narrow gamut panel is a good fit. We measured it as covering around 98% of the sRGB colour gamut – which is the palette of colors used across the internet, games, and SDR video content. It's relatively accurate, too, and despite a tendency towards slightly oversaturated reds, you're unlikely to spot the discrepancy without a colorimeter to hand.

The IPS panel delivers a clean set of results. Brightness peaks a little higher than its predecessor, with a maximum of 267cd/m2, and contrast is slightly improved, too, at 1,386:1. These are good figures for a budget panel, and they go hand in hand with natural-looking color reproduction. The white point is a touch too warm at around 6,100k, but both gamma and greyscales are reasonably accurate, and the average Delta E of 1 indicates very respectable colour accuracy.

In our testing, we tended to prefer the Game mode as it gave a more accurate white point – 6,381k – which translated into a more natural-looking image. Technically, color accuracy was worse with an average Delta E of 2.1, but this isn't noticeable for casual usage.

BenQ claims a 5ms GtG response time, and that seems just about on the money. And it's good to see that you get basic VESA MediaSync support for basic adaptive refresh rate support with Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

Motion clarity is very impressive for the money. At the panel's maximum 144Hz refresh rate and with overdrive set to its fastest Premium setting, games look crisp and clear. There is some inverse ghosting, but it's not horribly intrusive, and while the motion isn't as smooth as some of the Fast IPS panels we've seen in budget gaming monitors, it's more than good enough.

The backlighting is exactly what you'd expect for the money. The sides of the panel look a little dimmer than the centre once you start to pay attention, and in our testing were as much as 13% dimmer than the centre. That's nothing unusual nor particularly intrusive, though.

BenQ GW2490C monitor: Is it worth it?

If you're wondering why the GW2490C has only received 4 stars rather than 5, then the answer is simple: there's a lot of competition around the £100 mark.

For instance, its own stablemate, the GW2490TC, was retailing for £115 at the time of writing – and £15 is a small price to pay for an adjustable stand and 20 watts of USB-C power delivery. And then, once you're spending that much, it's only another £15 or £20 to upgrade to a budget 27in QHD monitor.

Admittedly, it's those small incremental price rises that can easily break IT budgets when you're buying in bulk. And if your budgets are tight, be in no doubt – the GW2490 is a good budget business monitor. It offers respectable image quality, useful productivity-focused features, and is versatile enough to flit between productivity and gaming without skipping a beat. For around £100, it's a dependable choice.

BenQ GW2490C monitor specifications