TelephoneSystems.Cloud stands out from the crowd of VoIP providers as its automated quote system lets you set your entire business service up without having to speak to any representatives. We tested this by visiting the main website (given away by the company name) and clicking on the “Get Quote” button, after which we were guided through a set of questions asking about our requirements.

For our VoIP testbed, we requested four users, chose to use our own internet provider, opted for softphones and our existing desk phones, skipped the optional Webex Teams+ and Presenter, asked for new UK phone numbers and selected the automated installation service. TelephoneSystems.Cloud presented us with an itemized bill showing a £60 setup fee and monthly charges of £11 per user, which we agreed to by completing the transaction with our banking details and setting an admin account password.

You’re nearly there now; the next web page asks for a preferred area code, details of the services required such as call groups and queues, plus auto-attendants and the MAC addresses of existing desk phones. Lastly, you add details of your users, provide passwords and choose their extension numbers.

On completion, we received an email and SMS advising us the account was being created. It was ready for action two hours later, and at no time during this process did we speak to anyone.

From our account dashboard, we saw that all our users had already been assigned a direct inbound dial (DID) number from the block we’d requested. Onboarding is simple: you issue an email invitation from the dashboard that provides a link to the Webex client and mobile apps, along with instructions on setting them up.

After installation, users sign in with the Webex email address and password the system assigned to them and they’re ready to start making and receiving calls. This is the standard Webex app so it offers plenty of useful features, including personal contact lists and a quick access dial pad. Integral videoconferencing lets users make video calls with consummate ease.

Pre-configured desk phones can be ordered online, with choices including Yealink, Jabra and Polycom. For our own Yealink T42S models, instructions were emailed to us so we just entered the supplied provisioning URL in their web consoles and, after a firmware upgrade, they were automatically assigned to each user.

Voice prompts for services such as the auto-attendant, voicemail, holiday greetings and on-hold messages can be added, and TelephoneSystems.Cloud goes a step further than many providers with its AI text-to-speech service, which costs £10 per message. Alternatively, you can upload your own audio files to an online library, and the company even offers professional voice actors to create them for you, with online quote services provided.

The dashboard presents plenty of account information and a call history graph for the past six months, while the billing section keeps you posted on the latest invoices and upcoming payments. All the action takes place in the account portal, which lists your sites, assigned numbers, all users and associated devices such as desk phones and mobile apps.

An incredible range of call-handling services are available and include an auto-attendant, call center, call parking, groups for ringback, hunt and pickup and much more. Rules control the numbers and countries to which outbound calls can be made, while group contacts are synced to Webex so they appear in the apps.

TelephoneSystems. Cloud is a great choice for businesses that know what they want from cloud-hosted VoIP services. The quote process is impressively smooth, and it offers a wealth of easily accessible call features at a competitive price.

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On its website, Samsung lists this monitor as the S90PC ViewFinity 5K Smart Monitor, but it feels more like a smart TV on first “boot”. It asks to be connected to your Wi-Fi network, and once you’ve jumped through various hoops you’ll find yourself in Samsung’s TV Plus section with a huge selection of live channels. Just to hammer home the point, your first interactions are via a remote control rather than an OSD.

The remote offers dedicated buttons for Disney Plus, Netflix and Prime Video. We watched the first few minutes of Top Gun: Maverick and the detail was so rich on the 5K panel that we picked up several details we didn’t spot in the cinema. Samsung backs up the visuals with the best speakers here by some distance. Whisper it, but there’s even bass on show.

You can also play games via Samsung’s Gaming Hub, with an option to sync your Amazon account via Luna. It supports Xbox Game Pass and Nvidia’s GeForce Now services, too. Games look great, despite the S9’s modest 60Hz refresh rate.

But we’re getting this the wrong way round, for Samsung is promoting the ViewFinity S9 as a work first, play later monitor, so let’s head to the Workplace area of its Tizen OS interface. Here, you can wirelessly connect to a PC, a Samsung phone (using DeX) and even log in to your Microsoft 365 workspace.

The latter is aggravatingly slow, though, and there’s also annoying lag on the wireless connections to your PC and phone, so you’ll reach for the Thunderbolt cable where possible. And at this point, finally, it becomes a normal monitor. Albeit one with a 5K (5,120 x 2,880) resolution, which gives a quite stunning 218ppi density. Overkill, but photographers will love the detail, and it makes the 109ppi of a 1440p 27in screen feel distinctly average.

At this price we expected mini-LED technology, but IPS is in place as usual.

It’s an 8-bit panel with FRC, giving 1.07 billion colors, but what will matter for professional users is that it comes pre-calibrated for sRGB and DCI-P3. Not Adobe RGB, though, which is a surprise as the ViewFinity S9 lists Pantone validation among its many features.

There are also two slots available in the OSD for hardware calibration via recent Samsung phones. Using the Smart Things app, you can opt for a simple 30-second calibration for basic colors and brightness, or complete a ten-minute “professional” calibration to either the sRGB or DCI-P3 color spaces. The result was little better than the pre-calibrated versions, but could be useful if the colors drift over the years.

Most of the time, though, you’ll find the default “Eco” mode does the job, which uses the panel’s native color profile and covers 99% of the DCI-P3 space. We’re not sure “Eco” is the correct term, however, as this is the most power-intensive 27in display here, consuming 42W at 200cd/m² and 61W at its peak 629cd/m². Films benefit from even higher peaks thanks to support for HDR.

The monitor itself looks stunning. Its thin bezels and stylish finish remind us of Apple’s Studio Display, and while we would have liked more tilt than 15° back and 2° forward, at least it includes 120mm of height adjustment. Only an ambient light sensor interrupts the clean lines of the front display, with the traditional OSD controls tucked next to a sprinkling of connectors at the rear: a miniDisplayPort, one USB-C input (complete with Thunderbolt 4 support), and three USB-C connectors for peripherals. The main USB-C port delivers 98W of power but the others a miserly 4.5W, which is surprising when you consider the gigantic power brick – think cigar case – that you’ll want to hide under your desk.

There’s one final bonus here: a 4K webcam. It comes with a privacy cover, albeit one that’s easy to lose, but for ultimate privacy simply disconnect it. The slimline unit attaches magnetically to the rear of the panel via pogo pins, so you can chuck it in a drawer when not in use. When it’s time for calls, its superb detail capture will surely impress.

Whether it’s great enough to justify the price is a different matter. If it included mini-LED technology we could understand the £999 tag, but the S9 – while a lovely monitor – only makes sense for those with money to spare and the need for a 5K work screen during the day and an entertainment center at night.

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You can almost consider the Philips 34B1U5600CH as the spoilt older brother to the AOC CU34P3CV. They appear to share similar genes: both are 34in curved VA panels boasting a 3,440 x 1,440 resolution, and they gave near-identical (and strong) performances in our technical tests. Whites look good, DCI-P3 color coverage is strong at 85%, and an average Delta E of 0.58 means you can trust that colors are accurate.

The reason it’s spoilt is that this monitor gets many of the features that are missing on its AOC rival. There’s a respectable, albeit grainy, 1080p webcam that supports Windows Hello, a power sensor that switches the screen off if it detects no-one is there, plus an ambient light sensor. The speakers are also better; hardly hi-fi quality, but you can actually listen to music on the Philips 34B1U5600CH.

It wins the numbers game, too. Its refresh rate is better, at 120Hz to 100Hz. Philips also quotes a higher peak brightness, of 350cd/m²to 300cd/m², although in our tests the gap narrowed with 368cd/m²versus 355cd/m². And the one-upmanship stretches to the ports, with its main USB-C connector delivering 100W of power to the AOC’s 65W. It also adds two USB-C ports to the four USB-A ports found on the hub, with half on the left-hand side of the display and half at the rear.

The Philips also has a superior stand. That’s true for the numbers – note its excellent 180mm of height adjustment – but also for fit and finish, with its swivel option being far smoother. Philips’ OSD is also easier to navigate, but just like the AOC it’s difficult to see what buttons you’re pressing, and don’t expect a huge range of useful options. It’s worth using the SmartImage presets, though, as it can be useful to jump to, say, Easy Read or Low Blue Mode.

But here’s the challenge for Philips. At well over £500, it’s a hefty chunk more expensive than the AOC – its equal for panel quality – while the also excellent-value-for-money Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5 sits in the middle. And the Iiyama has a better warranty than the Philips, as it offers on-site swapout rather than return to base (where you have to cover courier costs to get it repaired).

The 34B1U5600CH is a fine screen, and if you’ll take advantage of its extra features then you can argue it’s worth the premium over the AOC. However, it needs to drop below £500 to compete for awards against this month’s ferocious competition.

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The ProLite XUB2763HSU-B1 has one obvious rival here: the Acer Vero B277. Give or take a fiver, they cost the same, both include a 1,920 x 1,080 IPS panel and both lean heavily on their green credentials.

In the Iiyama’s case, that means the plastic is 85% PCR, the packaging 100% recyclable and made from cardboard pulp, an EPEAT Silver rating and arguably most importantly an incredibly low power rating. Even at its peak 251cd/m²brightness, it drew 11W dropping to 10W at our standard test brightness of 200cd/m². That compares to the typical 16W to 18W for 27in panels in this test.

Iiyama jettisons frills such as USB-C and RJ45 connectors in its quest to hit such a low price, but let’s concentrate on what you do get. Two video inputs, one HDMI 2.0 and one DisplayPort 1.2, sit alongside a two-port USB hub. Both ports are only 5Gbits/sec, but without USB-C you’re reliant on a USB-B connection back to the host PC anyway.

Both USB ports sit on the left of the screen rather than the rear, making them slightly easier to access, and the flexible, high-quality monitor stand can swivel through 45˚ and pivot 90˚. You may also want to use the 3.5mm headphone jack at the rear after listening to the weedy speakers.

There is some entertainment potential, thanks to a 100Hz refresh rate, 3ms response times and support for AMD FreeSync to prevent tearing. We were surprised to see these features in such an affordable monitor.

More good news: this is an 8-bit panel, which always helps when it comes to color coverage and accuracy compared to 6-bit panels that use FRC. In its default mode, the ProLite covered 94% and 72% of the sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts respectively, with an average Delta E of 0.95. Highly respectable results.

As we’d expect from an IPS panel, whites look good, but we’ll add two caveats for those who are looking for a Word or Excel partner. One is that a Full HD 27in panel has an 81ppi pixel density, so text never looks as sharp as it will on panels that go above 100ppi. The second is that the default profile’s color temperature is 6078K rather than the ideal of 6500K, so you may find it useful to play around with the color temperature options in the easy-to-use OSD. You can also use Iiyama’s i-Style presets for Scenery, Text, Cinema and Games, but don’t expect to see any huge changes.

With an aggressive price, superb performance in our annual reader survey for support and reliability, plus a three-year swap-out warranty, this is a fine choice if your priorities are value and low energy consumption.

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UK-based Gradwell has been in the communications business for over 25 years, and its Wave cloud VoIP service will appeal to SMBs seeking a smooth transition from their legacy analogue systems. Deployment is a breeze. Gradwell manages the process for you, and pricing is easy to understand as you only need to concern yourself with the number of monthly call minutes to landlines and mobiles that you require.

Wave comes in three packages, and they all offer the same call-handling features along with the Wave desktop and mobile apps. The Wave 100 package costs £7.50 per user per month and provides 100 monthly call minutes; Wave 1000 starts at £10.50 and allows 1,000 minutes; and Wave 3000 costs from £15 and, you’ve guessed it, offers 3,000 minutes.

Reliability is assured since Gradwell hosts Wave on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and will create new instances as needed to cope with increased demand. Redundancy is covered, too, with Wave being deployed across three geographically diverse AWS sites.

Gradwell handles all on-boarding by creating your main admin portal account, assigning phone numbers and adding a base set of users if you’ve requested them. Desk phones can be added to your order and will arrive pre-registered to your account so you only have to plug them in.

The Wave administration portal presents an account usage overview and provides easy access to all the core features and call-routing services. To add new users, you simply enter an email address to send their invitation to, set a password and decide whether to give them admin privileges or just make them Wave users.

Direct inbound dial (DID) numbers and available desk phones can be assigned to each user, and you have options to enable voicemail, activate inbound and outbound call recording and set up call diverts to an external number or another Wave user. Multi-factor authentication can be enabled, and when users activate their account they receive a personal web portal and download links for the Windows, macOS, iOS and Android softphones.

The Wave user portal is a simple affair, with options to withhold their outbound CLI, access voicemail, assign busy lamp fields (BLFs) to their desk phone screen menus and view a contact list. A softphone is required to make and receive calls, and we had no problems installing it on Windows 10 and 11 desktops along with iPads.

The softphone offers the same features as the web portal and adds a dial-pad, a recent call list and access to settings such as notifications and sounds. Gradwell removed videoconferencing from the softphone a couple of years ago, and this is now handled by its separate Teams+ service, which costs £2.50 per user per month and allows users to make and receive calls and run VC sessions directly from the Teams desktop app.

As you’d expect with such a mature product, call-handling features are abundant and include hunt groups with multiple routing steps, call conferencing, pick-up groups and automatic routing based on calendars or bank holidays. Call queues advise callers that they’ll be recorded, play music on hold and present them with a range of custom messages, while Wave’s interactive voice response (IVR) service allows you to record custom voice prompts, upload a WAV file or use the Wave default prompts.

Gradwell’s Wave provides an easily deployed cloud-hosted VoIP solution with sophisticated call handling features. Its flexible price plans are very affordable, and micro-businesses will find Gradwell’s new PSTN replacement bundle appealing as this starts at £9.50 per month and provides everything you’ll need, including a broadband connection, for a pain-free move to VoIP.

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Sometimes, numbers can’t do justice to products. In fact, if you judged this monitor by numbers alone then it wouldn’t even win an award, let alone the Labs Winner gong. No matter how well it might perform in technical tests, there was one number that would always rule them all: the price. It’s more than three times as expensive as the award-winning Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5, despite them sharing the same 4K resolution and 31.5in screen diagonal, and scoring similarly in our tests.

We think the Iiyama is great – and stupendous value – but the Eizo will make you go “wow” in a way that no other monitor on test here can. Much of the credit for this must go to the combination of a 2,000:1 contrast ratio and the color characteristics of an IPS panel. Aside from mini-LED panels, we’ve never been hit so forcefully between the eyes when looking at photos or films. Couple that with gorgeous whites and it’s the best all-round image quality we’ve seen in a monitor this size.

Naturally, you also benefit from the extras offered by Eizo monitors. Let’s start with the OSD, as this is not only incredibly intuitive and speedy – Eizo provides the best OSDs here by some margin – but also offers the ability to tweak colors to fine margins. Head into the Advanced Settings, for instance, and you can control hue, saturation and gain.

However, you’ll probably find it easier to switch between the presets. Those are sRGB, Paper, Movie and DICOM (for medical environments), plus two user-defined slots. The sRGB preset is particularly impressive, locking the panel down to exactly 94% of the gamut, without any spillover, and with an excellent –albeit not exceptional in this month’s company – average Delta E of 0.61. Switch to Movie and it leaps from 66% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut to 87% – again, with no leakage and strong accuracy.

While you don’t get the high-end color control provided by Eizo’s ColorEdge monitors, nor its ColorNavigator software, Eizo’s InStyle software is worth the 6.6MB download. Connect over USB-C or USB-B and you can save your color preferences (useful if you connect to different Eizo screens in a hotdesking office) and activate the circadian dimming option – this gradually shifts the color temperature over the course of a day. The separate InStyle server tool offers some basic management for IT teams, too, so long as the monitor is connected via the wired network port. Useful if you want to prevent users pushing up the brightness too high or control how quickly its Power Save mode kicks in.

There are plenty of ways for users to control how much energy this monitor draws, too. Activate the EcoView mode in the OSD and it will change the brightness based on the ambient light conditions, and if you want to take manual control then it goes all the way from 1cd/m²up to 400cd/m²(despite its official peak of 350cd/m²).

As with the ColorEdge, you also benefit from a generous five-year warranty with the promise of on-site swapouts if something goes wrong. We also love how easy it is to set up Eizo monitors: they come ready assembled, so it’s simply a matter of lifting them into place.

Here, despite what looks like a pair of fixed feet, the stand delivers a huge amount of flexibility. You can rotate through 45° in either direction, tilt it up 35°, adjust the height by an astonishing 195mm and pivot it 90° into portrait mode (imagine having two of these monitors side by side). We love the sleek bezels, too, giving the monitor a more modern look than previous Eizo screens.

Eizo provides a generous number of ports, with a pair of HDMI inputs and a DisplayPort alongside USB-C. Two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports sit at the rear, too, with one more to the side next to a USB-C downstream port for connecting peripherals. This delivers up to 15W of power while the main USB-C connector can feed up to 94W.

There are even a pair of 3.5mm jacks, one for a mic and the second for headphones. You may never need this, though, as a pair of impressive 2W speakers round off the FlexScan’s features. While they don’t offer the miracle of a strong bass response, they’re a surprisingly good choice for listening to music. You may even decide you don’t need a separate pair of speakers.

Admittedly, that £50 saving only fills a small part of the nigh-on £1,500 you’ll need to pay for this monitor. Despite the many advantages offered by the FlexScan EV3240X over Iiyama’s far cheaper rival, that’s tough to justify. But trust us when we say that if you find the extra budget for this monitor, you’ll appreciate the purchase years after the pain of paying the bill has gone.

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There’s a lot to like about this 27in, 1440p monitor. Especially for owners of Apple laptops, as BenQ goes out of its way to color-match its output with MacBook screens via the M-book mode. And that’s just the start: the brilliant OSD, arguably the best here, makes it simple to switch profiles between Coding, Movie, Game and sepia-tinted ePaper.

Those who find their eyes are tired by the end of the day will appreciate the Care mode, which uses an ambient light sensor to keep the screen at sensible brightness and contrast levels. You can also manually adjust low blue light options, with five intensity levels to flick between, while BenQ says its Flicker-Free Technology “eliminates flickering... to reduce eye strain, fatigue and headaches”. It also offers a Color Weakness Mode, where you can tweak the red and green filters.

A 1440p resolution is a great choice on this size of display. That works out at 109ppi, so at normal viewing distances it’s sharp. Sure, you miss out on the 4K detail of the similarly priced Acer Vero CB272K, but we prefer the whites of the BenQ display.

Don’t expect wide color gamuts. Despite all those menu options, its DCI-P3 coverage stayed at around the 70% mark throughout our tests, and in reality this panel is tuned to the sRGB space: it covered 98% out of a 103% volume in its default mode. Color accuracy is excellent, too, with an average Delta E of 0.43. For a 6-bit panel that reaches 16.7 million colors using FRC, we were pleasantly surprised by its quality.

BenQ also packs in a pair of high-quality speakers; certainly good enough to listen to music to during a working day. There’s no webcam, but oddly there is a microphone – complete with noise reduction – which may well do a better job than a standalone webcam’s. Another minor surprise: this stand swivels. Its slim, square stem looks like it should stay in place, but offers 20° of movement each way. There’s a decent 110mm of height adjustment, too.

Connectivity is mixed. There’s no RJ45 port and no USB-B input, so the three USB-A ports (two crammed into the rear, one at the side) and data-only USB-C port can only be used if you’re connecting via USB-C. Those with power-hungry laptops should note that this only delivers 65W. But, unusually, it offers a DisplayPort out for daisy-chaining a second display, and there’s a 3.5mm input to go along with the normal headphone jack.

Even without these features the BenQ BL2790QT is a great-value choice, but if you’ll take advantage of them then it’s a no-brainer.

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