How we test
As long-term readers will know, PC Pro is a “real world” magazine so we like to keep our tests as practical as possible. In this case, that means using each monitor as our daily screen and seeing how it performs; for instance, you’ll often see notes in the reviews that talk about the quality of the onscreen display (OSD), as that can make a big difference in daily use.
We support this “practical” with a selection of technical tests that check each panel’s colour performance across the sRGB, Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces. Other checks include gamma tracking, how close each panel gets to the target 6500K colour space, brightness uniformity across a 5 x 5 grid and measuring each panel’s Delta E. To perform these tests, we use an X-Rite i1 Display Pro colorimeter in conjunction with the open-source display calibration and profiling software, DisplayCal.
X-Rite and DisplayCal allow us to test each monitor’s colour accuracy from a central point on the screen. This process measures how close the displayed colours are to their intended shade. The difference between the intended and actual colour is measured in the unit of colour difference, Delta E; the higher the figure, the poorer the match. We provide average and maximum figures measured across 51 colours. The smallest colour difference that the human eye can discern is one Delta E, so a display with an average Delta E of less than one is considered perfect.
See the reviews for a summary of each monitor’s results and the graphs on p94 for a comparison.