Lenovo L27i-4B Monitor review: A high-quality basic monitor with a VGA input and 100Hz refresh rate

If you are looking to buy an office monitor for less than £150 then traditionally the best you could hope for was something that produced a higher level of clarity than an Etch A Sketch and better colour accuracy than a Kaleidoscope. Thankfully times have changed and budget monitors are no longer a byword for visual disaster.

Lenovo's new L27i-4B 27in FullHD productivity monitor is one of the new breed and can be picked up for around £130 – £108 ex-VAT – and offers a competent, even enjoyable, visual experience and comes with some handy extras like a 100Hz refresh rate a pair of loud 3W speakers. This then is an office display that looks like it is both cheap and cheerful.

Lenovo L27i-4B monitor: Design & Features

Aesthetically the L27i-4B is rather more than you'd expect from a budget office monitor. The cabinet and stand are made from white rather than the usual black plastic and the bezels that surround the screen are narrower than the norm at 6mm across the top and sides and 12mm at the bottom. Lenovos describes this as "ultra-thin" and in this case, that's not just hyperbole.

For a 27in monitor, the L27i-4B is usefully compact the light measuring in at 611.5 x 181.5 x 474.5mm and weighing less than 4Kg, all measurements were taken with the stand attached.

Connectivity is limited to two HDMI 1.4 ports, a VGA connector, and a 3.5mm audio jack. VGA ports are becoming more and more rare on modern monitors and this makes the L27i-4B self-recommending to anyone who has PCs with this legacy video output in their workplace.

Given the price and market position of the L27i-4B, we think it unfair to mark it down for the absence of a DisplayPort or Type-C DP Alt Mode video input. Given the lack of any USB data ports, the L27i-4B obviously lacks anything in the way of KVM support but for that functionality, you need to spend rather more than Lenovo is asking here.

At 255mm x 170mm, the stand has rather a large footprint for a 27in monitor but there is a handy slot cut into it that you can use to house your phone – but only in landscape unless you have an unusually small smartphone – while working.

The stand is a basic affair that only allows you to adjust the tilt angle between -5 and 22 degrees. If you want any more adjustment you'll need to invest in a VESA stand or desk arm, which you can attach to the 100 x 100mm VESA mount on the back of the cabinet.

The monitor is managed via a small joystick and action button that along with the power button sits on the reverse of the cabinet in the lower left corner. Plenty of monitors regardless of price have very ill-thought-out menus and button systems but Lenovo's implementation is simple and very easy to use.

If you don't want to reach around the back of the cabinet to access the controls you can download Lenovo's Display Control Panel – we'd suggest using the one in the Microsoft Store as the one we downloaded from the Lenovo site refused to install – which lets you access all monitors settings and a few extra features like desktop partitions via a Windows app.

Buried inside the base of the cabinet is a brace of 3W loudspeakers. Given that monitors in this price bracket don't always have speakers you shouldn't expect a Hi-Fi experience and that's certainly the case here.

There's volume aplenty with a peak output of 77.6dBA measured against a pink noise source at a distance of 1m but the sound is rather brittle and lacks anything you could realistically describe as bass.

That said the sound they make is clear and spacious making them perfectly good enough for voice or video calls. Play music through them and the sound certainly isn't unlistenable though it is a little tiring at higher volume levels. In short, the speakers in the L27i-4B are considerably better than nothing.

Lenovo L27i-4B monitor: Display Quality

Judging the image quality of the Full HD 27-inch monitor must be done through the prism of knowing that we are dealing with a panel with a lowly 81.6dpi pixel density. This means that pixel construction is visible in text, far more so than it is on a 27in 2,560 x 1,440 109dpi monitor like the MSI MP273QP. Of course, more pixels mean more money, and the MSI costs around £190.

For what is a budget panel, the L27i-4B performed admirably during testing. Peak brightness was nothing to get too excited about at 270cd/m2 but the contrast level was good at 1,416:1 thanks to a low black luminescence level of 0.19cd/m2, an excellent level for an IPS panel at the lower end of the price spectrum.

Gamut coverage was also impressive with an sRGB coverage of 99.3% and volume of 114%. The DCI-P3 and AdobeRGB volumes were rather less impressive at 81% and 78.5% but we've seen worse on monitors costing more.

As well as the expected Warm, Cool, Neutral, and Custom colour profile the L27i-4B also has an sRGB lock. In sRGB mode, the average Delta E color accuracy measured at 1.8 which is another fine result for an entry-level productivity monitor and well below the score of 3 at which point anyone with even a half-trained eye will start to notice errors in color representation.

The upshot of all those measurements and numbers is that still images and videos look colorful and natural while blacks look as black as you can expect from any display that doesn't use OLED technology. For the price, this is a very solid performance.

As is becoming more common even at the bottom of the monitor food chain the L27i-4B supports refresh rates up to 100Hz. This doesn't just make this a good monitor for some surreptitious lunchtime gaming but also means that spreadsheets and CAD animations move just that little more smoothly than if they running at a mundane 60 or 75Hz.

Refresh rate aside the way the Lenovo's motion fidelity is worthy of mention. Running the tried and tested Blur Buster's UFO test showed an impressive lack of ghosting even with the Over Drive setting off. Upping the Over Drive to Normal and then Extreme doesn't have much of an effect but given there are no downsides to running the panel in Extreme we settled on that as the default setting.

You can further sharpen motion by engaging the Moving Picture Response Time or MPRT setting but this does knock the brightness down to 180cd/m2 which some users may regard as too high a price to pay.

Naturally, at this price point, you have to forgo support for HDR content or active synchronization in the form the Nvidia's G-Sync or AMD's FreeSync.

Running a colorimeter over the screen divided into 25 swatches proved that it's an impressively uniform display with all the swatches falling within the recommended tolerance for brightness and accuracy. Again, for such a cheap display this is a good showing.

Finally, we opened a full black image on the screen at maximum brightness to check for excessive backlight bleeding around the edges but found nothing worthy of comment. The Lenovo demonstrated none of the 'IPS glow' and limited viewing angles that spoiled the otherwise impressive Philips 27E1N900AE.

This then is a highly competent and well-engineered IPS panel with no weaknesses and that's not something you can often say of a monitor costing under £130.

Lenovo L27i-4B monitor: Is it worth it?

If you need a monitor with a VGA input the L27i-4B is self-recommending because it's a feature becoming harder and harder to find on modern monitors. But even if that's not a primary requirement the new Lenovo is well worth consideration assuming you aren't willing or able to pay the extra for a WQHD 2.5K display.

The L27i-4B's panel has no weak spots worthy of mention beyond the less-than-stellar maximum brightness though the peak of 271cd/m2 is more than adequate for indoor use in our experience. The good color gamut coverage, impressive contrast ratio, excellent motion fidelity, and far from useless built-in speakers make this a highly impressive budget monitor. We can't think of a better way to spend £130 on a FullHD office monitor.

Lenovo L27i-4B specifications