Review ASUS VE247H, 23.6" LED LCD screen 2ms with speaker

Last week, I got bored of my 2 x 19" + 17" 4:3 lcd screens. I am an electronic / firmware developer and the software are designed to use widescreen monitor (with side bar that remove a lot of space). So I decided to buy a brand new screen.

First you have to know that I hate the brand benq/acer. The first computer I ever bought with my own money had a 28,800 acer modem with a acer motherboard.  I've had a lot of problems with their hardware. A lot of crashes, modem not working as it should ... They were producing low cost material, with the quality that is as low as their price. 10-15 years later, I am a sysadmin in a small business and they were having few acer laptops. Every user complaining about those computer. So, acer screen are not expensive, and they are low quality and place an acer screen near an LG screen, you will be surprised to see that the LG is a lot brighter! So I did not ever looked for that brand.

So, after comparing, chosing ... I came across the VE247H 23.6" with speaker and a refresh rate of 2ms!! 10000000:1 contrast ratio, these are very nice specs (for more information all the specs are available on the asus website http://www.asus.com/Monitors_Projectors/VE247H/#specifications ). In the online reviews, the worst comment was about the power led light that was bright orange (now it is light blue).

When I plugged the screen the colors are perfect (1080 full hd) the refresh rate is also very nice.

The problem I have with that screen is the stuck pixels. There are at least 15 including a big blue in the middle of the screen, and since I like to develop with a dark background it is annoying. There is 8-10 in the same square cm on the top.  I have contacted  asus support and they are working to send me a new one (they can ship the new one before I send the broken one and they pay both shipping).

This review is to be continued.... when I will get the new screen.

Hauppauge Broadway, network/wifi tv tuner (works with ipad, iphone, android and any browser)

I was looking for a way to listen TV on my iphone. The easiest product, most complete, was the hauppauge broadway, an external networked (wifi/ethernet) tv tuner that has an ATSC/ClearQAM tuner. (it also have other video input, see the picture below).



The firmware version of my unit: v3.1.609
File size: 9.2 MB
Date: September 17, 2012

The setup is quite easy, you only have to point your browser to http://distan.tv and the magic does it! ( I don't know how they do it) . The wizard will help you to setup the device.  I was not able to have the wifi to work, but it is not a big hassle since my Broadway is near my main router.  The setup will also scan for channels. For me, the device did not found 1 of our local digital ATSC TV station, luckyly, I'm not interested in this tv channel :-)


The web interface is very simple and the TV tuner is protected by a NIP defaulted to 0000 written on the login screen (there is also an administrator password).

As seen on the screen shot, on the left section you can see the list of the available channel.  On the right, you see the tv channel with few controls (stop, pause, record, volume control)

One missing feature would be to add a description of the tv channel.  The device can connect to EPG provider, which is not available in my region.

There is an option to put the device to sleep when unused.

With this device, if you add an external hard disk drive, you can schedule recording. Unfortunately, you can not schedule recurrent show (in my case, I would like to record the simpsons everyday, but need to schedule it manually everyday).

On the left, you see the recording form.

The video quality is nice, and a 1h recording will use around 8GB of data on the hard drive.

Regarding the external hard disk drive, I uses a 2 TB seagate usb disk and even if the Broadway was able to format the disk correctly and I can access the recorded show, most of the time the system is not able to record because the drive is not detected. Have to disconnect the HD and replug it to make things work. This is very annoying since this feature is nice and unusable!

Finally, the thing that annoy me most, and make me wanting to change this device is the fact that it will not manage connection nicely. I mean that everyday I need to reboot the device because it thinks somebody else listen to tv (and there is only 1 connection available).

I contacted the Hauppage support service and they did nothing for me.  Their first reply told me to solve my USB drive problem on my computer and download the latest version of the software. This was, for sure a standard answer that was not targeted to the broadway. I replyed with more details and they never get back to me with an answer...

Finally, on paper this device is very nice, and backed by the Hauppauge brand name I was sure it was a very good quality. Unfortunately, I feel this device is not yet ready for release. This is why I will try to get a refund.

Thank you for reading.