Acer XB280HK 4K G-SYNC Monitor Review
by Chris Heinonen & Jarred Walton on January 28, 2015 10:00 AM ESTAcer XB280HK: Display Uniformity
The backlighting of the Acer leaves a bit to be desired. As we see with the White uniformity, the left side of the display is much dimmer than the right. The right side has almost the same level of light as the center, but the left falls off by almost 25%.
Surprisingly the whole screen shows a drop in black level compared to the center of the screen. Every single measurement is 10% darker or more. I’d chalk this up to measurement error, but I redid the center measurement to be certain and it is correct. For whatever reason the center of the display is brightest, and the rest of the display will probably have better contrast ratios.
As expected, everywhere else on the screen has better contrast ratios than the center of the screen. While the center is only 728:1 the average is 807:1 and the median is 809:1. So our measured contrast ratios might be the worst case scenario for the Acer.
Color Uniformity on the Acer is not great. The right side, where we have the better white levels, is decent but the left side has larger errors due to the decrease in luminance. This large shift from left to right doesn’t reveal itself in gaming so much, but is more noticeable watching a movie or something else from a distance where you see the whole screen better.
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DigitalFreak - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
Dell U3415WDigitalFreak - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
If you look around for coupon codes, you should be able to get it for under $1000.Frenetic Pony - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
G-Sync seems like a dead end anyway. It's both GPU vendor locked and more expensive than "Freesync" which is also part of an open standard.eddman - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
"No G-Sync, but I don't like being locked into a GPU vendor when I only replace my monitor every 5 years or so."That doesn't make sense. When did you buy your monitor? A year ago? You could've bought a G-sync monitor and enjoyed the syncing whenever you ended up with an nvidia card in your computer, but now you can't have either of them for a few more years anyway; unless you change your routine and replace your monitor too.
Narg - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
I easily hit 60fps on my 1440p monitor with only a GTX 970 on most games. Not sure why people spend so much on hardware at times.IdBuRnS - Thursday, February 19, 2015 - link
"I can also hit 60fps easily with GTX 980 SLI with all options maxed."Well I'd surely hope so...
Mondozai - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
Jarred, a quick note:"A solution to this might be G-SYNC to enable gaming that looks smooth even when running below 60Hz"
That should be fps, not Hz, as the panel is at 60 Hz all the time.
paradeigmas - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
You do know the fundamentals of G-Sync is its ability to drop the refresh rate according to fps right? Which means if your game is running at 45fps, your G-Sync monitor will refresh at 45Hz.Antronman - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
But the usage of the word "Hertz" is still incorrect.JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - link
Fixed.