Performance - Part I
Testing methodology
A monitor review based on descriptive visual analysis will always have the underlying problem of subjectivity; assessments of panel quality will vary from user to user depending on their normative expectations. To get around this we’re deploying Datacolor’s Spyder 4 Elite professional monitor analyser and Leo Bodnar's input lag tester to return a quantitative assessment of display quality. These numerical results, we feel, add extra utility to our reviews allowing us to more accurately benchmark the following display characteristics:
- Colour Gamut relative to sRGB and Adobe RGB industry-standards
- Brightness levels and contrast ratios
- Colour uniformity
- Brightness uniformity
- Colour accuracy
- Input latency
The tests are run under two different scenarios: uncalibrated and calibrated. Uncalibrated performance equates to the ‘out-of-the-box’ settings a monitor ships with; this is the typical end-user experience as very few consumers engage in calibration of their displays before use. Calibrated performance is what results after the monitor has been put through the Spyder4Elite hardware-calibration process with the following parameters: 2.2 Gamma, 6500k colour temperature and 120 nits of brightness. These calibrated results demonstrate what the monitor is capable of when tuned correctly but the results have limited relevance to most consumers who will not calibrate their monitors.
Colour
The AOC Q2778VQE delivers the majority of the sRGB gamut with a respectable coverage of AdobeRGB, too.
Colour accuracy is less impressive with an average uncalibrated Delta-E of 3. Such a value is perfectly acceptable for consumer-level activities but in order for this display to be used in colour-sensitive workflows calibration is required.
The AOC monitor scores well for colour uniformity, which has only a slight top-right to bottom-left gradient.