Hello everyone!
Has anyone found a decent review on this monitor?
It just went on sale for dirt cheap (£230) and wondering if its because the thing is a hot mess or it's actually a decent deal.?
Thanks
Lenovo y25-25 240hz
Re: Lenovo y25-25 240hz
I had this monitor for a week, some of my thoughts on it.
Response time at 240hz and in the higher range is excellent. Very little perceivable blur or overshoot. Off and Normal looked about the same, with maybe Normal being slightly cleaner with the tiniest smidge of overshoot introduced, but the different was very slight between the two. Extreme introduced extreme overshoot, as expected - it's useless (though not the worst I've seen). These overdrive settings appeared to have the same effect at all refresh ranges.
Input lag seemed virtually zero, except in the lower refresh, at 60hz there was enough to notice. more on 60hz performance, the transitions weren't blurry but they didn't seem as fast as a TN, but this is to be expected. Adaptive sync worked perfectly (using a RX 5600), except in the lower ranges, it is advertised 48-240 but low frame compensation kicked in the mid 50's (Happens in Tekken 7). Otherwise the higher refresh ranges when playing games like Apex Legends which runs between 120-180 on my gpu on low, noticed absolutely no stutter, flicker, etc. Can't say how well GSync compatible works although nvidia certified it, so it's probably fine.
Build quality was excellent, a lot of metal in the stand and sturdy utilitarian construction overall. OSD is oldschool front button style - though I had no problem with it, I'm used to that sort of thing, it may bother some. It's overall a very military no-nonsense kind of build that you'd expect from Lenovo.
Pixel-walk was observable throughout, some more eye-catching, stitching and checker patterns, some light flashes in tones, these were observable with or without free-sync enabled. I didn't play with dark boost because I don't play games where it would be useful, but it has it. It has no black frame insertion options.
The main weakness of this monitor are in image quality, although black uniformity wasn't terrible there was some blue glow at the top right corner. Silvery glow can be found at off-angles as expected from these kind of panels. But overall in a well lit room, the blacks look black. But the colours; although decently accurate to an SRGB colour space, I noticed many weaknesses. Yellows appear greenish, Blues are dark, and bright blues and purples have poor colour consistency - a solid electric indigo had bluish glow. These effects could be found to some degree all bright shades aside reds, which had worse problems. Red and Orange appeared greyish, dark reds and oranges appeared too dark. Very weak reds. Calibration on the monitor is terrible - all the presents look very yellow or green. Only the user setting returns it to a more neutral tone. The white point is blindingly bright, greys are extremely bright. Contrast had to be turned down to tame it, but at the point of balancing out the gamma - the contrast of course becomes extremely poor. sRGB and Preset colour settings were useless, locking the brightness and many other controls. The sRGB actually did absolutely nothing to the gamut. The OSD calibration controls are overall very bad, there is no sharpness control either which this sorely needed.
But by far the worst thing about the image quality, which cannot be fixed by any amount of calibration is the coating of the monitor, although it does a good job fighting against glare, it has an oily wet look to it, not glossy but rather plastic it's hard to describe - it looks gross to me. The pixels look far too sharp, giving images a very pixelated look. not doing the 1080p panel any favours.
I know that's a lot of focus on image quality for a gaming monitor, although just to highlight this is a 240hz "IPS" panel. The IPS part feels wasted. I've had cheap bog-standard TN's that looked nicer than this, I might say this is the worst looking screen I've ever used. If you don't care or are particular about image quality, this is an extremely cheap 240hz monitor, probably the cheapest available right now. It performs well as a pure gaming monitor, especially at 240hz.
Response time at 240hz and in the higher range is excellent. Very little perceivable blur or overshoot. Off and Normal looked about the same, with maybe Normal being slightly cleaner with the tiniest smidge of overshoot introduced, but the different was very slight between the two. Extreme introduced extreme overshoot, as expected - it's useless (though not the worst I've seen). These overdrive settings appeared to have the same effect at all refresh ranges.
Input lag seemed virtually zero, except in the lower refresh, at 60hz there was enough to notice. more on 60hz performance, the transitions weren't blurry but they didn't seem as fast as a TN, but this is to be expected. Adaptive sync worked perfectly (using a RX 5600), except in the lower ranges, it is advertised 48-240 but low frame compensation kicked in the mid 50's (Happens in Tekken 7). Otherwise the higher refresh ranges when playing games like Apex Legends which runs between 120-180 on my gpu on low, noticed absolutely no stutter, flicker, etc. Can't say how well GSync compatible works although nvidia certified it, so it's probably fine.
Build quality was excellent, a lot of metal in the stand and sturdy utilitarian construction overall. OSD is oldschool front button style - though I had no problem with it, I'm used to that sort of thing, it may bother some. It's overall a very military no-nonsense kind of build that you'd expect from Lenovo.
Pixel-walk was observable throughout, some more eye-catching, stitching and checker patterns, some light flashes in tones, these were observable with or without free-sync enabled. I didn't play with dark boost because I don't play games where it would be useful, but it has it. It has no black frame insertion options.
The main weakness of this monitor are in image quality, although black uniformity wasn't terrible there was some blue glow at the top right corner. Silvery glow can be found at off-angles as expected from these kind of panels. But overall in a well lit room, the blacks look black. But the colours; although decently accurate to an SRGB colour space, I noticed many weaknesses. Yellows appear greenish, Blues are dark, and bright blues and purples have poor colour consistency - a solid electric indigo had bluish glow. These effects could be found to some degree all bright shades aside reds, which had worse problems. Red and Orange appeared greyish, dark reds and oranges appeared too dark. Very weak reds. Calibration on the monitor is terrible - all the presents look very yellow or green. Only the user setting returns it to a more neutral tone. The white point is blindingly bright, greys are extremely bright. Contrast had to be turned down to tame it, but at the point of balancing out the gamma - the contrast of course becomes extremely poor. sRGB and Preset colour settings were useless, locking the brightness and many other controls. The sRGB actually did absolutely nothing to the gamut. The OSD calibration controls are overall very bad, there is no sharpness control either which this sorely needed.
But by far the worst thing about the image quality, which cannot be fixed by any amount of calibration is the coating of the monitor, although it does a good job fighting against glare, it has an oily wet look to it, not glossy but rather plastic it's hard to describe - it looks gross to me. The pixels look far too sharp, giving images a very pixelated look. not doing the 1080p panel any favours.
I know that's a lot of focus on image quality for a gaming monitor, although just to highlight this is a 240hz "IPS" panel. The IPS part feels wasted. I've had cheap bog-standard TN's that looked nicer than this, I might say this is the worst looking screen I've ever used. If you don't care or are particular about image quality, this is an extremely cheap 240hz monitor, probably the cheapest available right now. It performs well as a pure gaming monitor, especially at 240hz.