Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
OSD Setup
Pressing any key brings up a quick menu.
The “e” symbol represents Acer’s picture modes, explained below. The second icon indicates brightness control. The third is Overdrive. The fourth grayed-out symbol says ULMB. Unfortunately, that feature does not exist on this product. The fifth button brings up the main OSD.
Here are the five picture modes: User, Eco, Standard (the default), Game and Movie. The only adjustable one is User. When you make any changes in the other modes, you’re automatically switched to User.
Acer eColor Management is another name for the picture modes. Brightness and Contrast work as expected, although it’s unusual that we’re able to increase the Contrast setting from the default. That usually induces clipping, though here we were able to improve the grayscale accuracy at 100 percent brightness by upping it a click.
There are multiple gamma presets, but they are too far apart to be useful. Fortunately, the 2.2 setting is reasonably close to the mark. The next lowest level is 1.9, which noticeably washes out the picture. Going the other way results in a dark, flat image. It’s best left on 2.2.
There are three color temp presets, plus User. Warm is pretty close to D65, as you’ll see in our benchmark results.
Selecting the User color temp takes you to RGB sliders that start in the center of their ranges. We really like this because it allows adjustments that don’t reduce contrast. In fact, we were able to increase it a little during calibration.
The OSD can be read in multiple languages, and the menu timeout has a maximum of 120 seconds.
Obviously the XB280HK shares its menu firmware with other products, so some of these options are grayed out. There is only one input and DDC/CI is locked to On, as it should be. Overdrive control works well on the Extreme setting, where it results in very little motion blur, even though the panel tops out at 60Hz.
The refresh rate bar is a feature we haven’t seen before. You can make it either four or eight pixels wide, and it appears in the lower-left corner of the screen. The bar moves up and down to let you know the frame rate in real time. There is no numerical indicator, but can approximate where you are. Of course, it only works in G-Sync mode.
Reset returns all settings to their factory defaults. Turning the Power-off USB charge to On means the ports will continue to function when the monitor is in standby. This is handy for charging mobile devices.
Here is the signal information. Unfortunately, all you get is resolution and refresh rate, which will always be 60Hz. The Mode field will say G-Sync when a compatible video card is present or Normal if your board is non-compliant.
