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.
Grayscale Tracking & Gamma Response
Our grayscale and gamma tests are described in detail here.
The EA275UHD ships in its Native color mode with some energy-saving features turned on. We turned off any option that alters brightness before running the white balance and color benchmarks. Native shows a general lack of blue at 40-percent brightness and above. Grayscale patterns look a bit reddish-green and actual content has a slightly visible haze.
Simply switching to the sRGB mode produces almost perfect results. Now all errors are well below 3dE which means they’re invisible. If you want the best compromise between accuracy and contrast, choose this mode.
If you nitpick over tiny errors like we do, you’ll need to calibrate one of the numbered presets. In this case we used number three which starts at 7500K. The adjustments we made reduce contrast so you’ll have to decide which factor is more important when you set up your EA275UHD.
Here is our comparison group.
Obviously we’d prefer to see a number under three in this test but the EA275UHD comes pretty close. This represents the Native color mode. sRGB is much more accurate at only 1.14dE. That’s a good choice whether you can calibrate or not because as you’ll see below, there’s only a little more performance available with the RGB adjustments.
The best numbers happen when you calibrate the number three preset. .89dE isn’t the best result in this particular group but any monitor that scores under one is worthy of consideration for professional use.
Gamma Response
The one flaw we discovered in our tests was the EA275UHD’s gamma tracking. As you can see it’s not consistent throughout the brightness range and it runs light. Even though the impact on image quality isn’t significant, NEC is leaving a little performance under the table. If you buy the SpectraView package you can correct this error using a software calibration. Or you can use CalMAN to do the same thing.
Here is our comparison group again.
Even though tracking isn’t terribly flat, it isn’t the worst in the group. It’s interesting to note the last-place finish of the VP2780-4K since it uses the same panel part as the EA275UHD. That screen posted a similar result but it has an sRGB mode that fixes its tracking issues.
We calculate gamma deviation by simply expressing the difference from 2.2 as a percentage.
With an average value of 1.95, the EA275UHD is further away from 2.2 than many monitors we’ve tested. Perhaps a firmware update could fix this issue because performance is excellent in every other respect.
