Test 2 Picture Quality

Quality is critical for large displays

The best brightness setting is the one that balances with your surrounding ambient lighting conditions

A 4K display is no longer a rare beast, but it’s something that will appeal particularly to designers, video editors, and anyone else who works with large visual projects. This means the quality of the display itself is critical, so we tested with both moderately low and office-level ambient lighting. In addition, each screen warmed up for an hour before we ran our tests to ensure full image stability.

Our Spyder5Elite colorimeter tests showed that, while none of these displays achieved full coverage of the Adobe RGB colour space (a rare thing indeed), the 32-inch AOC came much closer than the rest at 92%. The Asus, BenQ and Lenovo all got 80%, while the Philips achieved 81%. The difference between 80% and 81% is too little to bother with, and the AOC’s higher score is significantly undermined by its VA panel technology. In practice this means you must sit face-on to see colours and contrast accurately. With a screen this wide, that’s not possible across the entire width... so things will always look a little different in parts of the screen. For gaming that’s not a big deal, but any kind of graphics creation can suffer.

Colour us impressed

Contrast ratio, the difference between the darkest and lightest tones, is an interesting statistic. It’s bandied about a lot, and high ratios can make a difference in brighter environments. We’ve noted scores at 50% brightness in particular, as that’s likely to be a real-world average brightness setting. AOC’s display achieved 1330:1, a score almost twice as high as the rest, so if your environment is strongly lit and can’t be muted, this will hold out better. However, in normal conditions this isn’t as critical as many believe. The scores of all the others (even the lowest ranking, for Philips at 700:1) are more than good enough for work done in typical conditions.

Related to this is absolute brightness. The best brightness level setting is one that balances with your surrounding ambient lighting. Pushing a display to its maximum brightness in lower lighting conditions is dazzling and can interfere with accurate colour perception.