For off-axis viewing, there’s no better tech right now than IPS. You can sit as much as 45 degrees from center and still see a decent image. The light falloff is minimal and the color shift associated with TN monitors is virtually non-existent. In addition, with monitors as bright as these, the effect can be further minimized at high output settings.
The ZR30w looks just like all of the other large IPS screens we’ve photographed for recent reviews. Color shift is minimal at all angles and light falloff is practically non-existent. The pattern appears different on the HP because we had to display it as a Windows desktop graphic rather than using the pattern generator. The end result is the same. You can still clearly see the differences in the brightest and darkest bars. This indicates good retention of highlight and shadow detail at off-axis viewing angles of up to 45 degrees.
Here’s the DoubleSight DS-309W:
The results here are about the same. If you look close, the darkest two bars are barely delineated from each other. However, they do not crush at a 45-degree viewing angle. That's still excellent off-axis performance. We suspect subtle differences in the two monitors’ anti-glare layers are the reason for the variation.
If you’re wondering why the white balance appears different in the two photos, it’s because we changed cameras midway through the review process. We didn’t discover the difference until after returning the monitors to their manufacturers. Rest assured the photos are directly comparable, since we kept the exposure values the same.
Screen Uniformity
While some monitors are better than others, no LCD panel has perfect screen uniformity, and even samples of the same model can have quite a bit of variation. So, since there’s no fair standard for applying a rating to different monitors, we’ll simply present the results of our measurements.
To measure screen uniformity, zero percent and 100 percent full-field patterns are used, and nine points are sampled. We’re now expressing the values as percentages relative to the center of the screen.
| HP ZR30w | ||
|---|---|---|
| Black Field Uniformity | ||
| 101.11% | 142.58% | 84.24% |
| 114.22% | 100.00% | 137.39% |
| 106.87% | 110.28% | 134.41% |
| White Field Uniformity | ||
| 81.87% | 89.08% | 86.77% |
| 92.14% | 100.00% | 94.24% |
| 87.44% | 96.64% | 91.40% |
The ZR30w shows a couple of hot spots in a black field pattern. The most visible are at the top-center and bottom-right. The white field pattern looks more uniform, but the center is slightly brighter than the rest of the screen.
The DoubleSight fares a bit better.
| Double Sight DS-309W | ||
|---|---|---|
| Black Field Uniformity | ||
| 77.91% | 88.04% | 84.46% |
| 82.04% | 100.00% | 84.88% |
| 82.95% | 90.24% | 93.20% |
| White Field Uniformity | ||
| 90.29% | 90.68% | 86.19% |
| 101.38% | 100.00% | 93.79% |
| 101.44% | 102.72% | 96.97% |
This is an excellent result. White field uniformity is especially good with only the tiniest differences from point to point. The DS-309W isn’t too far behind the best-in-class Samsung S27B970D in this metric.
- 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.