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OSD Setup & Calibration
The extensive OSD is exactly the same as seen in previous EA-series displays. Touching the Menu key brings up your options along with small labels telling you the functions of the other controls.
The luminance menu controls brightness and contrast along with several options for power saving and settings for the sensors mounted on the bezel. The EA275WMi can be programmed to shut down after you walk away from your desk or just dim the backlight. It can also vary output based on ambient light levels. To ensure accurate calibration, we turned the sensors and the Eco mode off. This menu also offers six fully-adjustable picture modes. We stuck with the default Standard preset for all testing.
The aspect menu allows sizing of the image for analog signals. In this case, you’d have to use a DVI input for that since there’s no VGA connector. The main feature of this menu however is the Uniformity option at the bottom. That can be either on or off. If you want finer control, NEC’s PA-series monitors offer five levels of compensation.
The color menu has seven color temp presets plus a programmable memory that works with NEC’s calibration instrument. N (Native) and sRGB are identical and come pretty close to Rec.709 and D65. The numbered slots can be adjusted with very precise RGB sliders. D stands for Dicom Sim and is used for some medical imaging equipment.
Remaining ergonomic settings are packed into the fourth sub-menu. You can control things like LED brightness, DDC/CI, DisplayPort MST, PBP, overdrive, and the like. We left all these settings at their defaults for our tests.
The OSD menu offers nine languages plus lock, timeout, and hot key functions. You can also control on-screen messages here. Of note is the Data Copy option, which copies settings from the master to the sub-monitors in a ControlSync setup. We were able to test this since we had a second EA275WMi on hand. Full details are on the next page.
The last two screens are all about information. Every NEC display has detailed power consumption data which includes carbon footprint and actual energy cost based on the user’s particular rates. Signal info includes resolution and refresh rate along with the monitor’s serial number.
Calibration
The EA275WMi comes set to its Standard picture mode and Native color temp. This combination produces very accurate color and is not in great need of a calibration. Our only gripe is the default gamma tracking is a bit off the 2.2 standard. There is no gamma control, so the only way to make improvements is to calibrate one of the numbered memories. We chose number 3 and tweaked the RGB sliders to get all grayscale errors below 1dE. This helped gamma a little and added a bit more boldness to the image. Please feel free to try our settings below. If you have the SpectraView II kit with meter and software, you can achieve the same results without making adjustments to the OSD.
| NEC EA275WMi Calibration Settings | |
|---|---|
| DV Mode | Standard |
| Brightness 200cd/m2 | 52 |
| Brightness 120cd/m2 | 29 |
| Brightness 100cd/m2 | 23 |
| Brightness 80cd/m2 | 17 |
| Brightness 50cd/m2 | 9 |
| Color Temp 3 | Red 96.9, Green 98.4, Blue 96.4 |
