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Viewing Angles, Uniformity, Response And Lag
To learn how we measure screen uniformity, please click here.
This is a fairly typical TN panel result except the side-to-side light falloff isn’t quite as severe as usual. You can see the red/green shift plainly but you don’t lose nearly as much detail or brightness as most other TN-based gaming screens. The top-down view shows that vertical angle is the more important setting to get right. Move to far above or below center and you lose detail and brightness.
Screen Uniformity: Luminance
During the ANSI contrast test, we remarked on the XL2730Z’s high-quality panel. The black field uniformity result confirms that observation. For all intents and purposes, this result is perfect. There is zero light-bleed from our press sample.
Here’s the white field measurement:
The white field result is equally superb. Edge-to-edge brightness is perfectly uniform to the naked eye. Our data shows a slight hotspot at screen center, but that can only be seen by our C6 meter.
Screen Uniformity: Color
The XL2730Z ties with its stablemate XL2430T in the color uniformity test. Again, we can’t see any problems, but our instruments show a slight green shift in the top-center zone.
Pixel Response & Input Lag
Please click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.
We’re seeing consistent response times of seven or eight milliseconds from all of the TN-based gaming monitors we test. Even without motion blur-reduction, there is very little resolution loss in even the fastest-moving on-screen objects. Of course, since the XL2730Z has the best blur-reduction we’ve seen, we recommend using it all of the time.
Here are the lag results:
The LG 24GM77 is our current record-holder for low input lag. Fortunately, other screens (the XL2730Z included) aren’t too far behind. A difference of eight milliseconds is imperceptible and certainly won’t affect the gameplay of even the most competitive enthusiasts. A refresh of 144Hz is the way to go if response is important to you.
FreeSync
As with G-Sync, there is no point of comparison between monitors – it either works or it doesn’t. Once we installed the correct drivers in our test system, enabling FreeSync in the Catalyst software produced perfectly fluid motion in Watch Dogs and other games we tried. No matter how quickly you move the mouse, there is no tearing whatsoever.
