NEC EA305WMi 30-inch 16:10 IPS Monitor Review

Viewing Angles, Uniformity, Response And Lag

To learn how we measure screen uniformity, please click here.

Off-axis quality is typical for an IPS panel. To the sides we see a shift towards green along with about a 50-percent light reduction. From the top there’s a similar drop in output and no appreciable change in color. The only panel tech that has made significant strides in this area has been AHVA which is a variation of IPS found in a few of the gaming monitors we’ve tested.

Screen Uniformity: Luminance

Our EA305WMi sample shows decent uniformity except for a bright spot in the lower right zone. This one measurement was the spoiler because without it, the final number would have been much lower. You can see the compensation doesn’t do much here. Making a significant change in this particular monitor would require an unacceptable increase in black level.

Here’s the white field measurement.

The compensation does improve white field uniformity by 33-percent but the result without is still ahead of the majority of displays in our database. As we stated earlier, it’s a conservative feature. It makes a small improvement in uniformity and causes a small drop in contrast.

Screen Uniformity: Color

When we reviewed the DS-309W we weren’t recording color uniformity measurements so we don’t have a result for that screen. Our EA305WMi sample is affected by an area of green tint in the upper right. Turning on the compensation eliminates that issue so you might want to use it if your content has a lot of large white areas. We believe the image still looks best when UC is turned off and the anomalies we measured didn’t affect the content we viewed.

Pixel Response And Input Lag

Please click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.

23ms is an expected response result for a 60Hz IPS monitor. The overdrive feature works extremely well at reducing motion blur with no trace of ghosting both in either test patterns or fast-paced moving content.

Here are the lag results.

Gamers with hyperactive trigger fingers will probably be seeking a fast-refresh gaming monitor rather than an enterprise workhorse like the EA305WMi. But its input lag isn’t excessive and casual players blowing off steam after work won’t have a problem fragging if their opponents aren’t of significantly higher skill.