Monoprice 30-inch IPS LED Monitor Review

OSD Setup And Calibration

Curl your fingers around the lower-right edge of the IPS LED, count down two buttons from the round power key and press. That will bring up the OSD at the center of the screen.

OSD Tour

All you need to navigate the menus are the up and down arrows, which are at the bottom of the control cluster. The menu itself is minimal, with just enough features to set the image to your liking. Please read on though, because not everything works as expected. You’ll need to do things a bit differently to properly calibrate the Monoprice.

This is the first place we encountered a challenge. The Brightness slider does not appear to control the backlight. In fact, to get the best gamma and eliminate detail clipping, we set it to 100, the maximum level. That means light output is controlled by the Contrast slider. Lowering it to 80 gives us the required 200cd/m² we test at, but also reduces image contrast noticeably.

The 30-inch IPS LED comes out of the box in its Bluish color preset. As you’ll see in our grayscale tests, the image is very blue. If you don’t calibrate, the Normal and Reddish options are better choices. The best option, of course, is to adjust the RGB sliders in the User mode.

The OSD is pretty small. If you want to measure the center of the screen (as we do), it must be moved to one side. You can do that here and make the timeout as long as 60 seconds.

You only get five language options for the OSD. Most monitors offer more. Then again, they cost more too!

Initialize is another word for “Reset”. Be careful because there’s no “Are You Sure” message before all of the settings are returned to their factory defaults. Aspect Ratio choices are Wide (the image fills the screen regardless) or 4:3 where black bars appear on the left and right.

DCR stands for dynamic contrast ratio and its effect is quite apparent. Maximum output almost doubles to over 470cd/m² and black levels are clipped almost to the 30 percent mark. Contrast shoots up to over 6000:1 but gamma is completely hosed. We’ll show you all the results in detail on pages four and five. Needless to say, its use should be avoided.

Calibration

Calibration can be accomplished once you set the brightness control on maximum. Anything lower and you’ll see crushed shadow detail without any improvement in black levels. Light output is controlled with the contrast slider. We lowered it to 80 for 200cd/m², which cost us some dynamic range. When we got to the color adjustments, the RGB sliders were able to dial in a decent grayscale, and gamma tracked reasonably well. The color gamut measurements revealed that we were dealing with an Adobe RGB panel. There is no CMS or gamut preset, so if you need sRGB/Rec.709, you are out of luck.

We’ve read a few complaints about this monitor’s color accuracy on the Monoprice website. If you use our settings below, you’ll see an obvious improvement in image quality.