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Supplied in attractive retail carton printed in full colour with smooth satin finish.

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AOC Rivio 22in TFT 2230Fm: flexible viewing

Anthony Caruana | 11 August 2008

Bright and shiny, the AOC Rivio 2230Fm LCD backs up its elegant appearance with great performance.

The AOC Rivio 2230Fm is a great looking display. The gloss display is surrounded by a shiny black bezel with a single large button at the bottom of the screen. The button is surrounded by a multi-directional controller that's used to access and change the screen's various configuration options. The overall impression of this monitor's appearance is that it wouldn't look out of place on the desk is an ultra-modern office.

Plug and play installation worked well with image quality being very good without the need to install any special drivers or software. There's connection support for VGA, DVI and HDMI and an in-built speaker making this a very flexible beast. Pressing the multi-directional controller's ‘up’ arrow let us easily toggle between different screen modes for reading text, browsing the web, gaming and watching movies. Image quality in each mode did vary but given the wide variety of adjustment options it was easy to find a default setting we liked best.

As well as supporting devices connected by cable, the 2230Fm can also play back multimedia content directly from USB storage devices and memory cards as it has an integrated Digital Media Player.

Getting the 2230Fm positioned comfortably on the desk will require the use of a stand for taller users as there's no height adjustment. However, there was good tilt range. The 2230Fm can't be rotated into a portrait orientation.

While not specific to the 2230Fm, it's worth giving some consideration to whether a glossy display is superior to a matte one. Certainly, there are as many people who think gloss is best as folk who prefer matte. Some design professionals suggest that glossy displays aren't as faithful to an image's true colours as matte. However, that's an open debate.

The glossy display on the 2230Fm did look great but there were plenty of annoying reflections. Combined with the glossy bezel, this did get on our nerves initially but, eventually, we learned to shut it out and it stopped being a bother.

Putting the 2230Fm through its paces with PassMark's Monitor test showed that it's an excellent display. Ellipses and diagonals were rendered with no jaggies and colours didn't bleed into each other with clear distinctions between adjacent colour blocks. Blacks were solid with whites being bright with no hint of gray.

The 2230Fm's display is rated as having 2ms response times. Certainly, when watching movies with fast-moving actions sequences, there was no blurring and it was bright enough for shading to be clearly visible, even in scenes with low lighting.

We couldn't spot any dead or stuck pixels on our review unit. AOC's policy is very similar to HPs with three stuck pixels, three dark pixels or a total of five non-functional pixels being enough for a replacement during the three year warranty period.

As well as the A/V inputs, the 2230Fm acts as a USB hub with the two ports conveniently placed on the left size of the display with the card reader. The reader supports SD, MMC, XD and Memory Stick. That's probably good enough for most digital camera users now that CF is slowly phasing out of the consumer arena.

Other than the lack of height adjustment and landscape-only orientation, there's a lot to like about the AOC 2230Fm. Image quality, both in benchmarking and real world use was very good, it was easy to set up and it offers plenty of flexibility. This is a monitor worth considering if you're in the market.