Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
To read about our monitor tests in-depth, please check out Display Testing Explained: How We Test PC Monitors. We cover brightness and contrast testing on page two.
Uncalibrated – Maximum Backlight Level
he Zion Pro Kickstarter site claims 400 nits brightness for the panel, but I was only able to measure 263 nits with the brightness slider maxed. This doesn’t harm image quality at all, but if you were to use the panel in a very bright environment, outside perhaps, a little more output would be welcome.
Blacks are too low to measure, so I can only report the Zion Pro’s contrast as infinite. This is typical of the OLED panels I’ve tested. Though there are some high-contrast LCDs out there, none are on this level.
After Calibration to 200 nits
Calibration doesn’t change the results at all. Blacks are still too low to measure and contrast is still theoretically infinite. It truly doesn’t get better than this.
ANSI contrast is also impossible to quantify because my meters can’t measure the Zion Pro’s black level. The checkerboard pattern I use has a 50% average picture level. 0% black squares are next to 100% white ones. A backlit display can be affected by this juxtaposition, but an OLED addresses pixels individually so black ones can be turned off. The resulting image is as realistic as is possible for a video display.
