NEC PA271W - When Accuracy and Consistency Matter

Conclusion: Targeting Professionals

Sometimes it is very easy to write a conclusion on a product that is at a premium price point. If Intel or AMD come out with a CPU that’s faster than anything else out there, you can easily say “If you need the performance, or can afford it without an issue, just buy it.” With the NEC PA271W, despite the premium price it carries, the answer really isn’t quite as straight forward.

The easiest answer is for those who are gamers. The only 27” monitor with 2560x1440 resolution I can recommend is the HP ZR2740w. Every other 27" QHD monitor tested has had far worse lag, well more than a frame, and you just aren’t going to be happy with it. Perhaps if we see a move towards 120Hz panels at this resolution this will start to improve, but the target still seems to be graphics professionals at this point, not gamers.

If you are a design professional who needs accurate color more than anything else, and things like display uniformity and a wider gamut are of high importance, then you are the target for the NEC. You already know you might need this, which features you can’t live without, and are willing to pay the extra price. Of course you might have already bought one, or you got to a point in the article that you realized you needed one.

So what’s left is the power user that wants premium performance but doesn’t require it for their job, who wants to know if it’s worth it. Many of the features, like the KVM ability and the multiple presets, I found myself using a good deal at the desk. If it was bright I can easily switch to a higher output mode, and if it’s dark I can switch back to the lower setting. Switching between sRGB and AdobeRGB is nice for editing images as well, since I use my SLR in AdobeRGB mode. However, when you can buy two of the HP 27” displays for around the same price as a single NEC, are those features worth it?

Personally, I’m not certain I can justify the extra cost. I like having a highly accurate display, but the HP performed well after calibration, even though it wasn’t nearly as uniform. The extra features like a color-blindness mode might be essential for a designer, but for even a power user they likely will never get used at all. In the end I find myself saying that I really loved working on the NEC, and would love to own one, but for my use I can’t see spending the extra hundreds of dollars over the HP to get features that aren’t essential to me or my work. For some people they will be, but for most people there are monitors that might lack that last bit of performance but will get the job done just as well.