Planar 27" QHD Monitor Review: Clarity Like We've Never Seen

OSD Setup And Calibration

The OSD is fairly simple, and it's laid out like the majority of displays we’ve worked with. Follow along on our screen-by-screen tour.

First up are the basic image controls. You’ll notice the picture modes are missing from this menu. At first we weren’t sure if there were different modes until we saw them in the Manual Image Adjust menu, six screens down. The default mode is Standard which unlocks all adjustments. Brightness ranges from bright to really bright. Even at the minimum setting, the max output is over 170 cd/m². Contrast will clip if you set it past 59. ECO dims the monitor considerably and locks out contrast and brightness. Over Drive will smooth on-screen motion if you max it out at 100. And Gamma has settings of 1.8 to 2.4 in .2 increments. To get a curve of 2.2, set the preset to 2.4.

Next is the input select screen. You can also change inputs by toggling the 2 key on the front panel.

The third menu is Audio Adjust. Volume and Mute affect both the speaker and headphone outputs. The Audio Adjust option lets you choose the sound source, HDMI, DisplayPort, or Line-in.

You’re only able to see this menu in Standard mode. The 6500K preset is fairly close to accurate, but the User Color setting is even better. When we calibrated, we only had to make tiny changes to the RGB sliders to achieve perfect grayscale tracking.

This is all you have to do to dial in grayscale. The sliders start at their maximums; we prefer them to start centered. But given the results of our efforts, we can’t complain.

Fifth down is the Information screen. The only thing missing is the firmware version.

The first two options are only available for VGA analog signals. The Sharpness control is grayed out when the PXL2790MW receives a native 2560x1440 signal. When the scalar is active for lower input resolutions, Sharpness is best left at 50. Dropping and further results in image softness, while higher numbers cause ringing (edge enhancement). Aspect Ratio toggles between Full Screen (all input resolutions are scaled), 4:3 (creates sidebars), Overscan (eliminates about two percent of the image edge), and 1:1. In that aspect, a lower-res signal appears in a window, rather than stretched to fit the screen. And finally, we find the picture modes, referred to as Color Vision.

Only the Standard mode allows adjustments; this includes Brightness and Contrast. The other modes depart from established standards significantly. Scenery is extremely bright and a little green in tone. Cinema has a more comfortable output level, but is very warm and reddish. Game is also comfortable in its light level, but with an extreme blue tint. And Text is also on the warm side, though not as much as Cinema. If you don’t calibrate, Standard is still the best option for all computing tasks, gaming, and video content.

The final menu contains a few ergonomic options. Setup Menu sets the timeout, position, and transparency of the OSD. We like to move it to a corner to get it away from test patterns. Language Select has nine options, and Memory Recall returns all settings to their factory defaults. Be careful with this one. Selecting it resets the display with no additional warnings.

Calibrating the PXL2790MW is very easy. The only Color Vision mode that allows any adjustments is Standard. Literally, all we had to do was dial down the Brightness to hit 200 cd/m², set the Color Temp to User, and make the tiniest adjustments to the RGB sliders. And as you’ll see in the test results, these settings produce an extremely accurate image.