NEC PA243W 24" Wide-Gamut Professional Monitor Review: Out-of-the-Box Excellence
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Viewing Angles, Uniformity, Response & Lag
Viewing Angles
The PA243W is about as good as LCD monitors get in off-axis image quality. The panel is clearly a premium part. You can see almost no color shift to the side, with a light falloff around 40%. In the vertical plane, there is a visible change to red with a greater loss of brightness and detail. Under normal circumstances, users won’t see much difference in the picture up to about 60° off-center.
Screen Uniformity
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The PA243W has a five-level uniformity compensation control. And it’s the first one we’ve seen that provides a benefit with almost no contrast penalty. But you can see that in the case of our sample, it’s completely unnecessary. This might be the first time we’ve seen a monitor measure better in the black field test than the white. 2.17% is unbelievably low. While the results are sample-specific, we'd guess that you won’t find bleed or glow on any PA243W. Compensation seems to have a greater effect on brighter images and color, which show more improvement--at least to the meter. We see no difference with the naked eye.
Pixel Response & Input Lag
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The PA243W is hardly a gaming monitor, but its response and lag are what we normally see from a display in this category. Casual play is fine but any attempts at first-person shooters should come with reasonable expectations. We observed a little latency during our Tomb Raider sessions, but motion blur was low when we turned on Response Improve in the Advanced menu. Contrast and color quality were first-rate of course, and shadow detail popped nicely thanks to accurate gamma tracking.
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Christian Eberle is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He's a veteran reviewer of A/V equipment, specializing in monitors.