Acer XB280HK 4K G-SYNC Monitor Review
by Chris Heinonen & Jarred Walton on January 28, 2015 10:00 AM ESTAcer XB280HK: sRGB Calibration and Bench Tests
Pre-calibration the Acer has a blue tint to the grayscale and a very strange bump past 95%. This kind of bump typically means that the contrast is set too high, causing the panel to run out of a particular color before others. In this case it seems to be running out of red and green, causing the blue levels to spike. The gamma keeps rising as well, causing the dE2000 values for the grayscale to reach 3.0 at points.
Colors are fairly well behaved, with the dE2000 values for the color checker staying below 3.0 for most of the range. They are very close to 3.0, so on static images you can tell the difference from accurate colors, but for non-professionals the display performs reasonably well.
For calibration, we use SpectraCal CalMAN 5.3.5 with our own custom workflow. We target 200 cd/m2 of light output with a gamma of 2.2 and the sRGB color gamut, which corresponds to a general real-world use case. The meters used are an i1Pro2 provided by X-Rite and a SpectraCal C6. All measurements use APL 50% patterns except for uniformity testing, which uses full field.
| Pre-Calibration | Post-Calibration, 200 cd/m2 |
Post-Calibration, 80 cd/m2 |
|
| White Level ( cd/m2) | 200.0 | 200.4 | 78.8 |
| Black Level ( cd/m2) | 0.2602 | 0.2723 | 0.1157 |
| Contrast Ratio | 769:1 | 736:1 | 681:1 |
| Gamma (Average) | 2.31 | 2.18 | 2.60 |
| Color Temperature | 7065K | 6629K | 6493K |
| Grayscale dE2000 | 2.18 | 0.44 | 0.59 |
| Color Checker dE2000 | 2.42 | 1.60 | 1.55 |
| Saturations dE2000 | 2.35 | 1.36 | 1.48 |
Post-calibration the RGB Balance and Gamma is almost perfect. The contrast ratio is only 736:1 but that isn’t much of a drop from the pre-calibration level of 769:1. Color errors are reduced, but as I’ll show here, that is only because the luminance levels are fixed. Unless a monitor has a 3D LUT, you cannot correct for over-saturation or tint errors in a display. Using an ICC profile and an ICC aware application you can fix some of those, but most applications are not ICC aware. Below you’ll see the color checker charts broken out into three different errors: Luminance, Color, and Hue. Color are Hue are what we cannot fix, while Luminance we can.
As we can see the DeltaL values are almost perfect now, but the DeltaC and DeltaH values are basically identical to before. Unless you have either ICC aware applications, or a monitor with a 3D LUT, this is all you’ll ever be able to do to correct a display. Grayscale and gamma improve, but a display needs to have accurate colors to be correct.
Targeting 80 cd/m2 now and the sRGB gamma curve we see similar results. The contrast ratio drops even more but that almost always happens. Colors have the same issues we’ve seen the whole time, with the DeltaL improving but not the Hue or Saturation.
Color accuracy on the Acer is okay but not fantastic. Since the pre-calibration numbers for colors are almost all below dE2000 levels of 3.0 most people will be fine with it. Many 4K displays to this point have had a focus on designers and photo editors, but the Acer is very much a gaming display, and in practice few gamers will really notice anything with the colors unless a display is really off, and that’s certainly not the case here.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
69 Comments
View All Comments
NotLupus - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
Get a high-speed camera and test input lag then.AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
Yeah. The input activation could be tied to an LED, like caps lock already has, or if a mouse was modified. The camera measures the LED vs on-screen change.AnnonymousCoward - Thursday, January 29, 2015 - link
This Acer is so much fail!-TN at 28" is bad. Angles are inherently a problem.
-4K is too many pixels for today's GPUs.
-They capped framerate to 60Hz. This monitor would be far more interesting if it at least went up to 75Hz, and displayport 1.2 has the bandwidth.
-70% gamut is poor for games.
Older screen tech with Gsync added and a faster tcon would have been better, even if it was simply:
-30" 2560x1600 >90% gamut with Gsync at up to 100Hz.
yefi - Sunday, February 1, 2015 - link
I'd really like to see 30" 1600p monitors with g-sync. Unfortunately today, everything seems to be 1440p or 28" 4k. Whatever happened to vertical height?tsk2k - Friday, January 30, 2015 - link
The real question is where are the god damn oled monitors!?!?!?! LG????anubis44 - Tuesday, February 3, 2015 - link
Another issue for GTX970 users, of course, is that 4K will usually require more than 3.5GB of graphics card memory, which will put their frame rates in the toilet, so paying extra for a 4K G-Sync monitor for these users is adding insult to injury.perpetualdark - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
This article left out the other Acer g-sync option, the $599 XB270H. The downside over the ASUS ROG is it is only 1080, but then I never run anything higher than that in games anyway as it is more than enough resolution for my eyes. Plus you still need a pretty powerful graphics card to run at 1440 reliably. It is $200 less than the swift or the acer 4k. Yes, it is TN, but frankly it is the best looking TN panel I have ever seen, and unless I am trying to game from 10 feet off of center (why on earth would anyone??) it looks perfectly fine. Color is fantastic once I dialed it in a little, and the difference in games is spectacular. runs up to 144hz. Like the ROG swift, you can also choose to run in lightboost mode which makes your LCD look more like a CRT, although G-sync doesn't support lightboost at the same time as g-sync (changing strobe rates to match everything else would be a nightmare). The downside is you have to play a g-sync enabled game. Of course, if it isn't g-sync capable, just turn on lightboost and/or run at 120 or 144hz and you still get far better gaming performance over other monitors.I use an older 660 gtx card, and so far every game I have played pretty much runs liquid smooth at the highest settings. Lately I have been playing World of Tanks, and cranked all the way up, I can spin, zoom, pan, scroll, etc as fast as I want and I have yet to see a hitch or a tear, and I have tried to force it. I can go into the garage and with all those details on, spin my view back and forth as fast as I can whip the mouse back and forth, and no tearing at all. It is fantastic, and to me worth every penny.
I am sure some people will say things like 1080 is way too low of a resolution, or that TN sucks, or that $599 is still too high for a 27", but until something better is out, it is the best 27" gaming monitor you can get for less than $600. Sure, I could have gotten the Swift, but frankly I didn't need 1440 and that extra $200 got me a shiny new Samsung 850 pro ssd, and I am quite happy with it.
looncraz - Thursday, February 5, 2015 - link
"AMD GPUs don’t properly scale the resolution to fill the whole screen"This is a setting, pure and simple.
CCC->My Digital Flat Panels->Properties->Select the proper monitor->Scale image to full panel size
The latest AMD drivers also have "virtual super resolution" which allows you to run any game (or your desktop) at higher resolution than your monitor supports.
I play Battlefield 4 @ 3200x1800 @ 60 FPS - I disabled anti-aliasing and couldn't tell a difference at this scaling (when I could clearly see it - and be annoyed by it - at 1080p).
I will be doing this with every game that supports it now, super awesomeness.
Clorex - Tuesday, February 24, 2015 - link
What is pixel decay?From page 2 of the article:
"while G-SYNC can refresh the panel at rates as low as 30Hz, I find that anything below 40Hz will start to see the pixels on the screen decay, resulting in a slight flicker; hence, the desire to stay above 40 FPS"