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The AW2523HF includes HDR support, as do all the 360 Hz screens here. Without a wide gamut, though, the effect is more subtle. Honestly, HDR isn’t the reason to buy a fast gaming monitor, but as you’ll soon see, the AW2523HF is missing something that the others have.
HDR Brightness and Contrast
The first chart shows nothing special. All the 360 Hz screens have roughly the same peak brightness, with the ViewSonic delivering about 112 more nits. But the black level chart shows something that raises an eyebrow. Indeed, the AW2523HF is the only one with no dynamic contrast.
There’s no field or zone dimming feature, which means that SDR and HDR contrast are the same. This defeats the purpose of HDR support. But since one would buy this monitor for its performance, the solution is simple. Don’t play games in HDR. You’ll save some processing load which will deliver higher frame rates. And I’d probably extend that advice to all these screens. 360 Hz is about speed. The panels offer enough contrast to make games look amazing.
Grayscale, EOTF and Color
I tested all three HDR modes and found that color-wise, they were nearly identical. I recommend Desktop because it is the only one without edge enhancement. Game and Movie attempt to sharpen the image, but the net result is less motion resolution, which is not the reason one buys a 360 Hz monitor. Grayscale tracking is slightly blue, but the errors aren’t visible in content. The EOTF starts too light, so shadow areas are gray rather than black. The line then tracks the reference up to a 65% tone-map transition, also to spec.
Though the AW2523HF is an sRGB monitor, it does a respectable job with wide-gamut content. For material mastered in DCI-P3, it follows the saturation targets until the display runs out of color at around 80% for red and green. Blue is slightly over-saturated. It shows the same behavior with Rec.2020 content running out of red at around 70% and green at 60%. So, it’s making its best effort to show you the more saturated color, which is as it should be.
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