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If you want something a little more reasonable, the wide-screened Dell P3418HW is good for office workers who can make do with 1080p resolution. And Acer Predator X34 gives you a great gaming monitor with 4K and a curved screen that won't bowl you over.
This monitor delivers a punchy performance, offering excellent value-for-money, superb colour accuracy and great features like PiP and uniformity compensation. There are a few minor niggles but none of them really outweigh this monitor's big selling points. The menu options for Eco mode aren't particularly helpful, either. There are various modes listed: Standard, Text, Internet, Game, Movie and Sports, but these appear to be strictly presets for brightness and contrast. If you wanted to select, say, Game mode, you will need to find the separate Overdrive menu option (also found in the Luminance menu) and set it to Strong to shorten the response time. When activated, the response time drops from 15 milliseconds to 5 ms.
An affordable 4K panel with premium style
Just as the steps above, prepare your display for calibration by selecting the default mode, letting it warm up first and making sure the panel is free of smudges so the sensors can work accurately. Install and open the calibration software and follow on-screen instructions. The BenQ EW2880U is a multipurpose 4K monitor with a comparatively low price tag. For the money, you’re getting a 28in IPS panel with a 60Hz refresh rate, a 5ms response time and AMD FreeSync support. The EW2280U performed well on test, producing 114% of the sRGB colour gamut with strong accuracy and achieving brightness and contrast results that lined up very neatly with BenQ’s claims (300cd/m² and 987:1 respectively). These final figures don’t exactly make for great HDR, but as the monitor has no official HDR certification this is only a small niggle Note that you can bypass the OSD and use AOC's own i-menu instead – this is a software-based display control panel. Another interesting tool is Screen+ which can split your desktop into different panels and is essentially an improved version of Windows Snap. Early verdict Finally, the brightness averaged a decent 286.8 nits. For a monitor limited to standard dynamic range, that's pretty good. The LG 34UC89G topped out at 292 nits, while the Dell P3418HW averaged 263 nits. HDR-capable displays, like the Samsung CHG70, can go as high as 600 nits, but only for HDR-formatted content. At techradar pro, we're adamant that moving to a 4K monitor is one of the best upgrades that any business or professional can make to improve their workflow).
Finally, next-gen console owners will want to keep an eye out for HDMI 2.1 ports, the new standard that facilitates 4K/120fps on PS5 or Xbox Series X. There’s plenty of colour available with gamut volumes of 163.3% sRGB, 112.5% Adobe RGB, and 115.7% DCI-P3 while the Delta E variance scores of 1.2 vs DCI-P3 and 1.6 vs AdobeRGB are professional grade. With two HDMI 2.0 and one DisplayPort 1.4 video input, four USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 data ports, two Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C 4 ports, and a gigabit RJ45 LAN port, the Philips is very well connected. Is it worth two grand? Absolutely. As 4K monitors with HDR tend to be at the pricier end of the market, they often come with higher DisplayHDR certifications, such as DisplayHDR 600, 800 or even 1,000. The number indicates the maximum brightness (in nits) of HDR content on the monitor in question, and generally, the higher the number, the better. If you want the absolute best HDR experience, then your monitor absolutely needs to have local dimming technology too, so make sure to look out for it in the specifications. I found inverse ghosting occurred increasingly as I moved up through the higher overdrive settings.While colorimeters are good for transmissive media – emitted light (such as displays), spectrophotometers are also good for reflective media (such as paper). So if you want to make sure that what you see on the display is also what you will see when it’s printed out, than opting for a spectrophotometer might be a better idea. However, these come at a considerably higher price point than monitor-only colorimeters. This unassuming 27in panel is brimming with features that combine to create the most well-rounded 4K monitor we’ve ever tested. From a technical perspective, this is an IPS panel that refreshes at 75Hz. It performed well on test, producing 95% of the sRGB colour gamut with good accuracy; DCI-P3 reproduction was a little less than advertised but at 87% remains pretty good for a non-professional monitor. Other options include multiple gama presets, a Clear Vision mode for upscaling content, a low blue-light mode that filters out harmful rays and Dynamic Color Boost mode, which lets you ramp up the saturation for blue skies, green grass and skin tones. You can always play around with the OSD settings which provide an impressive level of granularity. More details are provided in the monitor's online manual.
Obviously, this monitor isn’t cheap, but it’s one of the most well-rounded high-end gaming panels we’ve ever encountered. Below, you’ll find our favourite 4K monitors, alongside a brief buying guide to help newcomers understand what makes a UHD display different from the rest. This 27in IPS monitor supports a rudimentary form of HDR: it’s not exactly going to blow your mind, but we noticed an improvement in colour vibrancy all the same. It also supports AMD FreeSync technology for reducing screen tearing when gaming. These things are noteworthy simply because they aren’t commonly found on office monitors; if you’re a casual gamer with a good rig that you’ve ended up reluctantly using very often for work, the 279C9 caters for you. To be totally transparent, we criticised the U27P2CA in our full-length review because we felt it was overshadowed by its siblings, the 1440p Q27P2CA and 4K U32P2CA. However, if you desperately want the increased screen real estate and all the trimmings for a very reasonable price, you won’t be disappointed by this monitor at all.
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Overdrive boost mode was the worst culprit, but with medium settings enabled I found it to be totally playable. There are also a few unexpected options. There's the Bright Screen mode, which lets you highlight one quadrant of the panel when running it as a four-screen multi-monitor display, literally highlighting one of the four feeds. Unfortunately, it applies only to input coming from the PC, and can't be used to highlight one screen from among multiple sources. monitors with VA LCD panels tend to have great contrast and good colours but much higher response times and poor viewing angles. They can also exhibit higher than average amounts of motion blur when gaming, due to slow pixel response times. AOC also has a software version of the display settings, called i-Menu, which gives you all of the same menu options and equally scant explanation of the various settings.
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