All of the panels we’ve tested recently display excellent grayscale tracking, even at stock settings. It’s important that the color of white be consistently neutral at all light levels, from darkest to brightest. Grayscale performance impacts color accuracy with regard to the secondary colors (cyan, magenta, and yellow). Since computer monitors typically have no color or tint adjustment, accurate grayscale is key.
Most users lack the equipment to calibrate their monitors, so out-of-box performance is important, especially in the grayscale metric. An error of over three Delta E is visible to the naked eye. Since most productivity apps have a white background, any tint is easily seen.
HP ZR30w
Because the HP has no calibration adjustment available, we’re showing the results at its max brightness setting.

For an out-of-the-box result, this is a pretty good chart. The grayscale error is below five at its worst and below three at its best. Since three is the visibility threshold, the HP has only a slightly visible error. The tracking is also fairly flat with little variation from dark to light.
After setting the brightness to 200 cd/m2 with the spectrophotometer, we generated the following result.

The difference is negligible, as it should be. This means you will have a fairly accurate white balance with good tracking no matter what the brightness setting.
DoubleSight DS-309W
The DoubleSight has both high and low RGB controls, making it easy to see the benefit of an instrumented calibration.

This chart was generated from the User color temp preset. We tried the other presets and found that User matches the 6500 K option pretty closely. The 7500 and 9500 K selections are extremely blue in tint, and to our eyes, unusable. As you can see, the white point is not at 6500 K, but somewhat cooler. This means whites and other light colors will have a bluish tint rather than a neutral one.
After calibration, the results are much better.

This is an excellent chart with no visible errors anywhere in the brightness range. Only 50 and 100 percent crack the Delta E two level, and then just barely. This measurement is right up there with the best monitors we’ve tested, even comparing favorably to many high-end televisions.
Here’s the grayscale performance round-up of all our recently-tested QHD screens.

Both HP monitors are near the top for stock performance, which is a good thing since they can’t be improved upon. The DoubleSight is at the bottom of the pack, but it does have the necessary adjustments to fix the white balance errors.
While the HP monitors’ numbers remain virtually unchanged, the DoubleSight makes a marked improvement after adjustment.

The DS-309W is much improved post-calibration, with an error that’s well below the all-important Delta E three standard. With an average value of just 1.64, it looks every bit as good as the competition to the naked eye. The HP screens look decent as well, but their small grayscale error is visible to users looking for the most accurate white balance. As always, we recommend calibration of any monitor, regardless of its stock performance. We believe the before and after comparisons above demonstrate the benefits quite clearly.
- 30 Inches And 2560x1600: Two Big-Screen Monitors
- Measurement And Calibration Methodology: How We Test
- Results: Stock Brightness And Contrast
- Results: Calibrated Brightness And Contrast
- Results: Gamma And ANSI Contrast Ratio
- Results: Grayscale Tracking
- Results: Color Gamut And Performance
- Results: Viewing Angle And Uniformity
- Results: Pixel Response And Input Lag
- 30-Inch QHD, Is Bigger Better?
Isn't the ASUS PQ321 already out along with a few other 4K monitors? granted price is a whole other story
You seriously can't see the pixels? I can see them on a 27" 2560x1440, which has smaller pixels. The .25mm range is adequate to me, but really I'd prefer something smaller than the .233mm on the 2560x1440.
When considering something like this for games, don't forget the cost of the video card(s) needed to drive it. A HD7750 may be "sufferable" even up to 1920x1080, but I'm not sure even a HD7770 or GTX650Ti could play newer games on better than "low" settings on one of these.
I have a ZR30W myself, and I would NEVER trade it unless what I'm upgrading to has more than a 2560x1600 resolution.
I've played on all sorts of monitors, and resolution trumps all other specs, unless you're dealing with 30fps or something...
I really wish I would have spent 1200$ on it long ago. Battlefield 3 and other highly graphical games are comparable to nothing else in the world.
The 60hz is not "old tech", it's more than sufficient to run games smoothly if vertical sync is on (even still when it's off). 60 fps is fine, television (pre hd) was 28hz. Anything above 60fps you really don't notice too much.
Oh, and for those looking for 4k tv's to use (I'm way ahead of ya) they only have 30hz refresh rates over the HDMI 1.2 port. We're going to have to wait for the tv's to add another port, wait for the upgrade to HDMI 2.0, or wait for some other solution.
We aren't going to see many 16:10 in the future. the 4K stuff is going to be 16:9 unless someone makes the move to stick with 16:10. However, the difference when it comes to 16:9 with a 2560x1440 and 16:10 2560x1600 is very minimal unless you really really need that extra height!
A properly implemented OSD would blend overlay pixels on-the-fly and add less than 100ns of lag to the process, which would be undetectable. The Viewsonic VP2770 has an OSD and is on par with the fastest LCDs in this roundup for total input-output lag. Having an OSD does not equate to lag.
The art of zero-lag OSDs is very old: countless computer CRTs from the mid-90s have it and TVs have had it for even longer. The OSD locks timing with the H/V sync and substitutes its signal over the relevant areas on-the-fly. With LCDs, this is even easier to do since everything is digital.
What is more likely happening is that "laggy" LCDs are doing extra image processing/enhancement or power-saving tricks such as dynamic brightness adjustments. For dynamic backlighting (power saving trick), the LCD needs to know what the brightest pixel is and then adjust the whole image so it remains the same while matching the brightnest pixel using the dimmest backlight possible. Tricks like those might explain why the slowest panels on this roundup are almost exactly two frames slower than the fastest: one frame delay to shift the frame in the memory buffer while applying filters and searching for the brightest pixel, another frame delay to shift the frame out to the panel with adjusted brightness.
Many LCDs do a lot more than simply dumping signal straight from the input to the display controller.
I wish threads that got bumped by spammers would stop bouncing back into my "new updates" list every time spam gets added and removed. I must have come back to this thread with the above post as most recent more than a dozen times by now.
I wish the forum would delete "new update" notifications when the newest post in a thread is older than the notification after spam got deleted.