Viewing Angles, Uniformity, Response & Lag
Viewing Angles
You won’t mistake the PG258Q for an IPS panel, but if you compare the above photo to those of other TN monitors, you can see that the Asus display retains more detail in darker areas and exhibits a less severe color shift to the sides. The familiar red tint is still there, just not as much. You can even see some detail in the top-down shot. Most others wash this view out completely. It would be great if this kind of speed were possible in a VA panel but apparently, we’re not there yet. For now, TN is the best balance of motion quality and image fidelity.
Screen Uniformity
To learn how we measure screen uniformity, please click here.
TN panels tend to be all over the map in our screen uniformity tests. Some perform well like the PG258Q. Others, not so much. Oh wait, the last place finisher is the IPS-based AG271QG. That shows how sample-specific our field tests are. We’ve already seen plenty of evidence that Asus is using a high quality panel part here. You should be able to buy it with confidence. Not only did both the white and black field results score below 10%, the color test is one of the lowest values in our database. This is one of the reasons for our sample’s high intra-image contrast.
Pixel Response & Input Lag
Please click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.
The PG258Q ties our record for quickest panel response and destroys the mark for overall input lag. If you’re wondering why anyone would turn off G-Sync, this is the reason. Locking the refresh rate at 240Hz means having essentially zero control latency. It’s pretty obvious from our results that refresh rates determine lag, even though the difference is miniscule. Those looking for that last nth degree of performance will find it here. We’d say it can’t get any better, but we know that future technologies will be even faster than this. For now and the foreseeable future, though, the PG258Q is the king of speed.
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