NEC MultiSync EA271U

An outstanding monitor that offers a cheaper alternative to the Eizo EV2785

SCORE

PRICE £632 (£758 inc VAT) from lambda-tek.com

The EA271U first graced these pages in early 2019 (se e issue 293, p92), earning a place on the A-List for its stunning whites and excellent all-round quality. Those traits haven’t changed a jot in the interim, with the monitor still a great choice for any office worker: it offers superb colour accuracy in the sRGB space, covering 98% with an average Delta E of 0.54.

The EV2785 covers a wider range of colours, however. Even after some tweaking and shifting through the different colour presets, we couldn’t persuade the NEC to cover more than 70% of the Adobe RGB colour space, with DCI-P3 only slightly better at 76.7%. However, where this monitor wins is for the range of colour temperatures, with the option to move from anywhere between 4000K and 15000K in 100K increments.

This range of options is typical of what’s on offer from the NEC’s OSD, which can seem quite overwhelming at first; it doesn’t help that NEC eschews graphics for text, with everything in caps to make it that much harder to read. Once you understand its logic, however, it’s easy to navigate through the options.

NEC’s screen offers many officefriendly features based around its USB-C docking, providing up to 60W of power and three USB-A 3 ports – albeit no RJ-45 network connection – and a USB-B connector means it can work as a KVM. Also note the handy downstream USB-C port. We suggest that music lovers take advantage of the headphone output as the two weedy 1W speakers are only suitable for basics such as web conferencing.

This screen is well suited to corporate situations, especially if you’ll take advantage of management tools such as ControlSync: this allows you to sync settings to eight “submonitors” from one master monitor. Its stand is flexible too, with 150mm of height adjustment and a 340° swivel along with portrait mode.

Almost two years after we first reviewed this monitor, we still love it. The Eizo EV2785 is a better choice if you need a wider gamut, but the NEC is cheaper and has KVM abilities that its rival can’t match.