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Grayscale Tracking And Gamma Response
Our grayscale and gamma tests are described in detail here.
The BDM4065UC offers three picture modes. Color Temperature is the default and shows an obvious but not extreme blue tint. You can adjust it in degrees Kelvin but the stops are quite far apart. One click warmer means 5000K which is much too red. Let’s see what happens in the sRGB preset.
sRGB only improves tracking by a marginal amount. The average error goes from 3.88 to 3.19 Delta E. You can still see the blue tint and the brightness control is locked out. The only advantage to this mode is better color gamut accuracy which we’ll talk about on the next page.
The User mode offers a decent grayscale calibration if you have the instruments available. Simply switching to that mode without further adjustment results in an error of 13.98dE which is very blue. The color temp is over 13,000K in fact. Dialing down the blue and green sliders brings things in line nicely. There is a small spike at 20 percent brightness but it’s not enough to be visible.
Here is our comparison group.
The BDM4065UC is a little weak out of the box and lags behind the rest of the monitors here. Of our jumbo screens, the BL3201PT ranks the best without calibration. If you don’t have the equipment, try our settings on page three and you’ll get pretty close to the same result.
Calibration improves grayscale tracking to a perfectly acceptable 1.15dE average error. There are still a few color gamut issues we’ll talk about on the next page but overall accuracy is more than adequate for gaming or productivity tasks.
Gamma Response
Even though there are five gamma presets, 2.2 is the only one you’re likely to need. As you can see it tracks almost perfectly regardless of the color mode. There is nothing to complain about here.
Here is our comparison group again.
The BDM4065UC just misses the top spot in this test. We can’t help but notice the top three panels are all VA. Good gamma tracking is key to making the most of high contrast. It seems that VA has checked that box.
We calculate gamma deviation by simply expressing the difference from 2.2 as a percentage.
The Philips and BenQ screens score a perfect zero percent in this test by virtue of their 2.2 average gamma values. It can’t get any better.
