Solid - that's the first word that sprang to mind as we took the HP L2245W display from its packaging. The large, flat stable base gives this screen a very robust feel.

Installation was straightforward. If you can't be bothered installing HP's Display Assistant software you can just plug and play. The Display Assistant provides an easy way to adjust the screen's settings and installs an optimised monitor driver. To be honest, we couldn’t see any improvement using the HP driver over the generic one that Vista supplied.

Getting the L2245W comfortably positioned is extremely easy. The monitor is mounted on an arm that can rotate, pivot, raise and lower so that it can accommodate almost any user on a standard office desk. Our only complaint was that getting the screen into a perfectly horizontal position was difficult as it doesn't click into the standard portrait orientation.

If you spend most of your time working with documents and page layouts then the ability to turn the display 90 degrees means you can display a full A4 page on this 22in panel at about 120% of its full size.

Setting the L2245W up was reasonably straightforward although we were annoyed that only a VGA cable was supplied with our review unit even though there are both DVI and VGA connectors. It's possible to have two computers connected to the L2245W and then to toggle between systems. There are no other video connections, such as HDMI, S-Video or composite, making this display a strictly computer-only screen.

As is common with many LCDs these days, the L2245W has a USB hub with two ports. While that's handy, the ports are only really useful for peripherals you won't be connecting or disconnecting frequently as the ports are difficult to access because they're adjacent to the power and video connectors.

Image quality was a little disappointing. While ellipses are rendered with minimal jaggedness, we found some colours looked a little washed out. For example, using PassMark's Monitor Test, the lines between blues and greens were a little blurry. Also, white blocks had a tinge of grey that was noticeable when compared to other displays in the labs. Text rendered quite nicely and wasn't blurry or difficult to read on the matte display.

There weren't any dead or stuck pixels on the review unit. HP's policy deems that a panel is defective if there are either three "bright" pixels where the colour is stuck on, three dark pixels (where the pixel is completely off) or a combined total of five stuck or dead pixels.

Testing monitors in the labs is a good excuse to put on a favourite DVD to see what a screen is really capable of. Battle sequences with fast moving objects worked nicely although the maximum resolution of 1,680 x 1,050 means that the L2245W isn't capable of displaying full high definition content. However, that's typical of displays of 22in or less. However, we found that the images were dark making viewing difficult.

So, who's the monitor for? We see this screen as being firmly pitched at business users. The solid build, sensational adjustment range and size makes this an excellent desktop monitor. However, the issues we saw with some colours bleeding a little and the difficulty in getting dark scenes to display clearly suggest to us that this isn't the right screen for a multimedia or gaming set up.

If you're contemplating a new monitor for the office then the L2245W certainly offers plenty of flexibility for the workplace. The ability to place the display in a wide variety of different positions and in either portrait or landscape modes makes this a reasonable office unit, although we found the graphics a little washed out.