Grayscale Tracking And Gamma Response
Our grayscale and gamma tests are described in detail here.
Neutral is the Envy 34c’s default color mode and it displays the best pre-calibration grayscale tracking. The errors are a little random but none are visible to the naked eye. Whites look properly neutral but as you’ll see on the next page, the red primary is a tad over-saturated in this mode.
sRGB mode provides the best color gamut but it pushes the white point a little towards red. You can just see a little extra warmth in the brightest steps but it isn’t too bad and the average error is still only 1.85dE.
If you select the Custom RGB mode, be sure and calibrate it because without adjustment it has an average error of 4.75dE with an obvious blue-green tint. Working the RGB sliders brings the white point in line to a very low error of 1.01dE
The Envy 34c acquits itself well in our group with a superb 1.36dE out-of-box result. Aside from a little red push there’s no reason you can’t just set Brightness to taste and enjoy the monitor unadjusted in Neutral mode.
The Custom RGB mode brings a small improvement but four other screens measure a little better. The Dell U3415W is aimed at professionals for a good reason. But there’s no reason you couldn’t use the HP for photo and graphics work.
Gamma Response
Gamma is absolutely perfect in the Neutral and sRGB modes. There are no presets so we’re glad to see HP got it right.
After calibration in the Custom RGB mode, gamma tracking isn’t quite as good but your eye will barely notice. Tracking is a tad below the line in the darker shades which will actually improve shadow detail slightly. We’re talking about microscopic errors here. Why did this happen? We think it’s because the RGB sliders can only be lowered. If they started at center-range it would be possible to leave gamma unaffected.
Here is our comparison group again.
A range of .19 indicates tight gamma tracking as shown by the previous charts. Even though performance takes a slight hit during calibration, it’s still an excellent result.
We calculate gamma deviation by simply expressing the difference from 2.2 as a percentage.
The average value is 2.14 which raises the deviation percentage just a bit. These results should not be correlated to which screen technology is in use. VA and IPS are evenly distributed here.
