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Viewing Angles, Uniformity, Response, Lag And FreeSync
To learn how we measure screen uniformity, please click here.
While we prefer the superior viewing angles of IPS screens, TN at smaller sizes works fine in single-screen setups. When you move 45 degrees to either side, color shifts to green and red and you lose about 40 percent of your light output. At the vertical offset, you’ll not only see a dimmer picture, detail washes out significantly. Viewed on-center however, you’ll tell little difference between the XG2401 and other display technologies.
Screen Uniformity: Luminance
Our XG2401 sample is one of the most uniform panels we’ve ever measured. Light bleed can spoil the gaming experience for sure but we didn’t even come close to observing any here. Coupled with the excellent black levels we measured this is a seriously nice screen.
Here’s the white field measurement.
White field uniformity isn’t at the top of the heap but a 10.14 percent result is still invisible to our eyes. There are no color shifts and whites are smooth and free of unwanted variation.
Screen Uniformity: Color
Very few panels can keep their color uniformity under one Delta E. While we can’t attest to the quality of every single XG2401 sample, ours certainly performs better than the vast majority of monitors we’ve reviewed regardless of panel type.
Pixel Response And Input Lag
Please click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.
In addition to great color and contrast, the XG2401 offers speed in keeping with its native 144Hz refresh rate. We set overdrive to its highest level for this test.
Here are the lag results.
A three millisecond difference in input lag is unlikely to be a factor for anyone but it you’re comparing monitors, the XG2401 is one of the fastest out there. We set the Low Input Lag option on Ultra Fast to reduce processing overhead. Even without it, we recorded a result of 29ms which is plenty quick. This along with FreeSync makes the ViewSonic a pleasure to play games on.
Gaming With FreeSync
Playing through our usual suite of titles revealed a little ghosting when we set overdrive to Ultra Fast. Standard proved to be the better choice. Even at framerates of 60fps or so, there wasn’t enough motion blur to distract in Far Cry 4 with detail set on Ultra. In less-taxing titles, we had no trouble maintaining speeds of 80fps or more with our R9-285-equipped system. While a monitor with a lower limit of 30Hz might be a better choice for the slowest video cards, the XG pairs well with boards of moderate capability.
