Color Fidelity

Asus has decided to follow the trend and use a panel with an optical filter. That was a mistake. Despite the manufacturer's claims on its Web site that the reflectivity of the optical filter is especially low, when viewing a dark picture, the LCD panel was as reflective as the gloss-finished shell! As always with panels that use filters, the colors are showy. They're well saturated, but imprecise, as my calibrator test shows. I also tried several default modes defined by the manufacturer as part of their "Splendid" system. The most convincing results were with the Normal mode (6700K) and Theater mode (6800 K). Oddly, the sRGB mode was completely off.

Color rendering was far from ideal. Frankly I can't understand why LCD manufacturers insist on using these filters when the results are always so mediocre.

Contrast And Brightness

The monitor's brightness is fairly well calibrated. This is a very good choice on Asus' part, since generally monitors with optical filters in movie format are outrageously bright. Asus has shown restraint. Still the black level is not very deep, and as a result the brightness was below spec - though visually the results are quite acceptable.

Color Gamut

Tested with the Gretag Eye-One Display 2, the PW191 wasn't all that impressive. The panel's color range covered the sRGB color space and no more. Looking at the curve on the left, you can see a characteristic S pattern, indicating a gamma problem. That also explains the results of the previous LaCie Blue Eye test.