Review on Sceptre E248W 19203R Monitor: Metallic, 60Hz, Blue Light Filter, Built-In Speakers, Tilt Adjustment (Model: E248W-19203R, HDMI) by Jonathan Sanford

I've only had the monitor for a few days and I'm not very impressed. The monitor control buttons are on the back where you'll have to blindly look for them and just remember which is a terrible design. All of my other monitors have the buttons under the front edge, where they're much easier to use. Having two HDMI inputs is good, but the actual steps to switch between inputs are cumbersome and screen switching speeds are slow. It's fine for an accidental switch, but if you find yourself wanting to switch between inputs frequently while sitting at your desk, this isn't a very good monitor. Worst of all may be the speakers - they're absolute rubbish in terms of both sound quality and volume (but see the last paragraph on turning the screen on and off). Increasing the volume in the monitor's system settings does not increase the audio at all at any setting above 50%. What you hear sounds like a 20-year-old laptop sitting on the floor of a school toilet - tiny, reverberant and very difficult to understand. I have several other monitors with built in speakers and these are by far the worst I have heard. In comparison, another monitor next to this one sounds fantastic. I have good speakers on my desk but was hoping to get rid of them to save space - certainly not with this monitor! Image quality seems decent - alongside a much older HP monitor of the same size. and resolution, both displays appear similar in brightness and color accuracy in a normal browser window, but this monitor looks very washed out compared to a screen with lots of high-contrast dark and light areas. I tried tweaking the picture and color settings and nothing improved the lack of good black and poor contrast. In fact, increasing the contrast makes black even grayer! But I'm very worried about reliability. I set this up yesterday and left it in sleep mode all night with the laptop - I didn't change any settings. . The laptop woke up fine this morning and the monitor turned on as expected, but as soon as I reached to the side of the monitor to find the control buttons, the monitor started blinking like a light with a loose or broken cable. When I pulled my hand away everything was fine, but I couldn't even touch the monitor to keep it from flickering and turning off. The power indicator didn't flicker on and off so that wasn't the case and I tried changing the input to both HDMI ports with no change. After I opened the OSD, the blinking stopped while the OSD was open, but resumed when I pressed the exit button. After playing around with the settings for about 15 minutes, I noticed that the monitor no longer shows any problems when I touch it. And still seems to be working fine after about an hour. But I'm very concerned about what caused this problem and how long it will be before it comes back. When I wiggle the HDMI cable on the back of the monitor it sometimes gets darker (but not as sensitive as it started) so I think this is the problem and I need to return the unit. such a pain