Large WMV 158MB
Medium WMV42MB

The styling of the 2401 borrows much from Gateway’s super-high end 30″ XHD3000 multifunction monitor. The screen has a glossy black bezel with silver trim. It weight 13.9 lbs and is only 5.9 inches deep, 22.5 inches wide and 17 inches high.

It comes with a quick-to-assemble mounting stand that allows the monitor to snap into place. The included stand is sturdy, but we found adjustment options on the 2401 to be wanting: it allows the monitor to tilt, but not to pan or to rotate and there is no lift. Thankfully, removing the four screws securing the monitor to the stand reveals a VESA standard mounting plate so that you can use the 2401 with any number of monitor mounts.

The FHD2401 uses Gateway’s signature touch sensitive controls to setup the monitor to your liking. Rather than buttons, the 2401 has an area to the lower right of the bezel that uses a touch-sensitive pad. The control areas only light up when in use, leaving you with a clean, button free monitor. You can control everything from brightness to contrast, color levels, input configuration and the like. The menus are intuitive and for the most part responsive, though we had a few instances in which it seemed as if the menu system became sluggish.

For the uberGeek control freak, Gateway has also included a copy of EzTime – an easy-to-use management software that allows you to adjust all of your preferences from the computer rather than the monitor. This software also lets you calibrate the color, contrast and brightness of your monitor so that it comes close to a “true color” representation of the source material.

The FHD2401 supports picture-in-picture and you can customize exactly how you want your PIP to look. You have control over size, location, division and the opacity of the screens. One of the nice features of this particular PIP implementation is that the monitor can automatically scale input resolutions to a user-selectable size without making the picture look horrible. .

Gateway was nice enough to send us the optional speakerbar for the 2401. It connects to the monitor via a power connector and an audio cable for the HDMI port. It snaps onto the back of the 2401 and gives users two headphone ports as well as a microphone input. It also comes with a standard pair of RCA inputs on the back of the bar to input audio from your game console, media player or other audio source.

In usage we found the FHD2401 to be a delight to use. The ultrabright screen really helped our color matching and we used it with our XBOX with no trouble whatsoever. The speakerbar, while a tad underpowered for a home theater system, was more than enough for the casual user or for desktop duty.