NEC PA302W 30-inch 16:10 Professional Monitor Review

Color Gamut And Performance

For details on our color gamut testing and volume calculations, please click here.

The gamut tests showed us the most significant effect of the metamerism setting. You can see that the blue primary is undersaturated, and the issue gets worse as you get closer to the outside of the triangle. Blue luminance is raised to compensate, but the resulting error is still quite visible. When viewing content, the perception is that there is a little more red than there should be, and brighter shades of blue look a bit pale.

Here’s the Adobe RGB mode, and, as expected, turning metamerism off fixes our previous issues. There is absolutely nothing to see here other than perfectly accurate color. It truly doesn’t get better than this.

The sRGB mode is equally exceptional in its accuracy. Are these the best results we’ve recorded? Let’s see below as we return to the comparison group.

The BenQ SW2700PT just noses out the PA302W’s Adobe RGB mode in the color error contest. Can anyone see a difference of .02dE? Certainly not. In fact, that figure isn’t too far from the tolerance level of our i1Pro meter. Notice that the other PA-series screen here also boasts an average color error under 1dE. Making this result more impressive is that it’s the average of 36 measurements.

Gamut Volume: Adobe RGB 1998 And sRGB

Despite the exceptional numbers we recorded in the error tests, the PA302W comes up a tad short in total gamut volume. That’s due to the blue and green primaries, which are the tiniest bit undersaturated. This is not a visible error, but users desiring maximum precision will want to use a custom ICC profile to ensure optimal color matching throughout the entire signal chain.