HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR PERFECT MONITOR Key professional features
Whether you’re buying a monitor for the office, living room or gaming den, take time to discover which features you need – and which you don’t
Have you ever tweaked a photograph to near-perfection on your PC only to find it looks terrible when it’s printed – or found that an old monitor can’t keep up with the latest games?
It’s easily done, especially when people don’t upgrade screens often – research shows that people let more time pass between monitor changes than when upgrading any other component or peripheral.
If you’ve been holding off, then now is an excellent time to invest in a new panel. The market is full of new tech and, due to fierce competition, prices have dropped significantly in the past couple of years.
The trick is to get the most for your money. If you’re a professional user, you need to pay attention to colour accuracy and the features you need to work comfortably and efficiently. If you’re a gamer, it’s all about refresh rates, response times and resolutions. And if you’re buying for the home, you’ll need a screen with plenty of versatility and solid image quality.
What kind of screen do you really need?
Display technology is constantly moving and professional monitors are often where the new tech can be found – especially when compared to gaming and mainstream screens, where aesthetics are sometimes more important than ability.
The four screens in this Labs’ professional segment run a wide gamut: we’ve got affordable displays that offer physical versatility alongside panels that aim to deliver superb image quality at necessarily high prices. If you want great colours without paying too much, there’s never been a better time to invest.
Similarly, we’ve got four affordable everyday panels, and a quartet of gaming displays that serve up curved designs, huge aspect ratios and recordbreaking refresh rates.
If you need professional display quality, a panel for 4K viewing or a screen that can help you win in the esports arena, it’s worth spending plenty of cash on a high-quality product. That’s not always necessary, though, so it’s essential to spend time working out what you want – or, indeed, need – from your monitor.
High-end, professional monitors are often equipped with features and specifications that most users won’t need – but these will often be critical in workplace situations. Take colour accuracy. If you create images or video for publication, good isn’t enough: colours have to be as close to perfection as possible. That means manufacturers often cherrypick the finest panels and backlights, and conduct rigorous calibration tests before the monitor leaves the factory. As no two LCD panels are identical in performance, perfection is an expensive, time-consuming business. Professionals also need excellent uniformity. For example, there’s always some drop-off in brightness towards the edge of a panel, and for games and everyday use that isn’t a problem, but too much variance is unacceptable for photo, video or design work, where you need to be able to rely on what you’re seeing. If colour, brightness or colour temperature vary too much across the panel, it’s impossible to know whether what you’re seeing onscreen is trustworthy.
If you do need that level of colour accuracy, it’s worth searching out a screen with hardware calibration. Eizo’s ColorEdge CG range include colorimeters that automatically maintain image and colour quality.
Colour spaces
Another key feature of professional monitors is the capability to reproduce a wider, more vivid range of colour than a standard monitor. Why is this important? Pretty much all the images and videos you see on the web are designed to be viewed in the sRGB colour space – most standard monitors, laptops and mobile devices are designed to reproduce this range of colour. (Although, because they aren’t calibrated, they should be considered as approximations rather than reproductions.)
For professional applications, however, you’ll see models described as being “wide-gamut” monitors; these can reproduce a far larger spectrum, or gamut, of colours. This is useful for artists and photographers who want to see a more intense, varied palette of onscreen colours, and it also more accurately mimics the range of hues that can be reproduced in print.
You’ll often see manufacturers specify that a monitor covers a certain
percentage of the Adobe RGB colour space – the best here claim as much as 99% Adobe RGB coverage, and we verify these claims in our tests ( see
“How we test” below). We also a look at screens that can handle the DCI-P3 colour space, for HDR, and some of the screens in this Labs can also adhere to colour spaces for different kinds of broadcasting – or for medical use.
Everyday options
There are features that are common to most of the monitors in this Labs – whether they’re affordable everyday panels or pricier professional screens. Most of these features concentrate on making day-to-day life easier, so it’s worth considering these peripheral concerns before taking the plunge.
Most of the monitors in this Labs have stand-adjustment options – such as height adjustment, tilting and swivelling. Several can be rotated to portrait mode and some have VESA mounting options. If you’re going to be moving a screen a lot or just want loads of movement versatility, pay attention here. Connectivity is crucial. Almost every monitor relies on HDMI and DisplayPort connections, but some here use DVI and D-SUB, too – useful for legacy hardware. Plenty of screens also offer USB ports, but a tickbox saying “USB hub” isn’t good enough: check for versions and locations depending on how you want to use your new monitor. Some models have features more normally found on TVs, such as picture-in-picture or picture-bypicture. Others have USB-C ports or even Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. Also consider the speakers: it’s no good buying a monitor for movies or gaming if the audio kit is awful. And, finally, we’d recommend perusing the dimensions and weight of a panel. Certain monitors demand a lot of space on your desk, while the weight can be a killer if you need to move your screen from desk to desk.
Gaming considerations
Gaming panels have their own range of considerations. They tend to have higher refresh rates than anything else as reproducing frames at a higher speed means gaming will be snappier and smoother. Most such screens also use AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync. These technologies synchronise the graphics card’s output to the screen’s refresh rate, which means no screentearing and smoother gameplay.
First, decide what refresh rate you need. Most decent gaming screens run at 144Hz, which is ample for almost all scenarios. Screens such as the Acer Predator XN253Q run at 240Hz, but only the keenest esports gamers will even notice the difference.
Then we come to the sync technology. AMD FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync broadly do the same job, but your choice comes down to hardware. Both AMD and Nvidia graphics cards can use FreeSync, but only Nvidia GPUs work with G-Sync. To confuse matters, Nvidia has three levels of G-Sync compatibility: G-Sync Ultimate is over-the-top for most people, while G-Sync is the best choice if you have an Nvidia graphics card. G-Sync Compatible simply means that the screen has been tested by Nvidia and it passes its basic quality tests.
Next, think about the resolution. It’s tempting to buy a screen with a huge resolution, but it’s no good opting for a 4K panel if your graphics card can’t produce the number of pixels required at the speeds needed to drive the monitor’s refresh rate. It’s all about balance. 1080p or 1440p is a good choice for a gaming screen.
Beyond that, consider whether you want a screen with a widescreen aspect ratio or a curved design. Both can increase immersion, but they also increase cost – and sometimes it’s more important to have extra vertical pixels rather than additional width.
Finally, consider response time, the speed at which a monitor responds to image changes. Most gaming panels offer a 4ms response time, which is fine for mainstream play. However, competitive gamers will be better off with a 1ms screen.