ASUS PA246Q - Display Uniformity

The large viewing angles allowed by an IPS panel only truly help if colors are accurate at the edges of the screen and not just in the center. On the PA246Q the lower-left of the panel seems to be brighter than the rest of it, as it is close to the same level as the center of the screen but the right and top sides of the panel are a bit dimmer. Even with those sides being dimmer, that is better than most displays where all sides are dimmer instead of just 50% of them. So white uniformity is better than average, but not perfect.

Black uniformity shows the same pattern, only in this case as the lower-left is brighter, it has worse performance that the upper right. If these black levels look worse than the previous black levels we discussed, these are set with the backlight at the level needed for 200 nits of white, which was around 40 brightness on this display.

Because I have the data, I added another chart this time, Contrast Uniformity. This simply takes the previous two charts and shows the relative contrast across the screen. Surprisingly the worst contrast was in the dead center of the display, so perhaps if I were to go back and do this chart for other displays I would find the contrast number we use is a worst-case-scenario. In any case, I plan to use this going forward as well since we already have the data, and we can see how close the contrast ratio is across the screen. Here the standard deviation is only 4.26%, which is lower than both the white and black uniformity deviations. So if you are dimmer in white, you’ll be darker in black by a comparable degree it seems.

Finally we can look at the dE uniformity of the PA246Q. Broken down by color the dE values are close for the most part, though the lower-left section of the screen is clearly way off on the grayscale and in most other colors relative to the rest of the screen. Surprisingly the center-bottom of the screen outperforms the center, which is what we calibrate to as our target, which is a bit strange. The average deviation for each sample is almost half a dE, which is a pretty large deviation when you consider that the average dE is right around 2. Overall the PA246Q seems mostly uniform, but with a couple outliers here that tend to skew the data.

LCD Color Uniformity

ASUS PA246Q - Color Quality More on the PA246Q CMS
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  • Integr8d - Thursday, August 15, 2013 - link

    Chris, just curious; Which $1000 plasma did you look at that did CMS correctly? I'm in the market and have a PR670 available to get something dialed in:)
  • chenesis- - Tuesday, February 4, 2014 - link

    Hi great review.
    So, do you suggest to only calibrate this panel from Standard mode, allowing the vga lut doing the whole job?

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