I’ve been keeping an eye out on for holiday deals on monitors for my home office. I found this HP 24" IPS 1440p monitor with some extra gimmicks like USB-C video input and a wireless charging pad built into the base for $150 at Micro Center, but it may be a dud.
RetailMeNot has a $5 off $30+ in-store coupon for Micro Center, so after tax I paid $153 and change. Nice.
(Pardon the mess on my desk, the HDMI output on my laptop is on the opposite side from the power, USB and Thunderbolt 2/mini DisplayPort ports, and I’m meaning to get a proper mini DisplayPort cable, at which point I can re-orient the laptop to have all the ports towards the back of the desk. The monitor came with a bigass pile of every kind of possible cable except mini DisplayPort and those are all piled up near my lamp. Ick.)
Anyway, the reason this specific monitor may be a dud is that it has integrated speakers, which are fine, but the speakers make a constant static hiss and high pitch whine whenever the monitor is turned on. It drives me bonkers.
I could go back to the store and exchange the monitor for another one that hopefully doesn’t make the sound, but I’m questioning whether that’s the right path. Aside from the noise issue, there are a few other annoying things about this monitor:
- My desk has a keyboard tray, which is of course the best possible thing for ergonomics and amazing and wonderful and I hate when I have desks without keyboard trays. But this HP monitor has no height adjustment, only tilt, and with my chair height adjusted for the keyboard tray, the monitor is higher up than I’d like.
- The volume controls for the built-in speakers are buried in a menu that takes a whole bunch of button clicks to adjust. On my Mac, the software volume controls are disabled when connected to HDMI audio, so any time I pull up a website where a video plays, if I haven’t put the volume nice and low, I get blasted and have to pause the video so I can go dive into the menu to adjust the volume.
- Even though it’s an IPS panel, the viewing angles are pretty bad. Sitting right in front of it, when looking at a primarily white screen, the white level is not uniform at all. It’s cool blueish at the bottom and warm yellowish at the top. The uniformity around the edges is also fairly bad. The whole bottom edge of the screen is darker than the rest of it, and the upper corners are kinda dark too.
Micro Center also has this Dell 24" monitor for only 10 bucks more. It’s a 16:10 aspect ratio, which I like, but “only” 1920 x 1200 resolution vs 2560 x 1440 on the HP. It’s kinda ugly looking. There’s no USB-C, and actually no HDMI either, only DisplayPort and DVI inputs, but I was planning to get a mini Displayport cable anyway. There’s no speakers, which, whatever. At least there’s no possibility it’d make the damn hissing noise like the particular example of the HP that’s sitting on my desk. The big plus though is its stand is height adjustable, and that 16:10 aspect ratio.
So, what say ye Oppos? Roll the dice on exchanging the HP for another one that hopefully doesn’t make noise? Or spend another 10 bucks for the Dell for the adjustable height and taller aspect ratio?