Color Quality and Gamut
Straight out of the box, the best numbers that the Acer can produce on our Gretag Macbeth test are pretty poor. The average dE is over 8, and the grayscale numbers are the worst that I’ve measured. The only shade even close to being an ideal number is yellow, with everything else having an error of 5 or above.
For our calibration tests we use ColorEyes Display Pro, an i1Pro meter, and we target 200 nits of light output, a gamma of 2.2, a white point of D65, and the minimum black level we can hit. Any adjustments that we can make in the monitor to correct white balance or colors are done before the calibration, and the best starting mode is used. I always try calibrations with and without DDC enabled in ColorEyes Display Pro, but haven’t run into a result in a long time where hand tuning it was better than using DDC; they are usually identical.
After calibration, the Acer is really improved. The grayscale has gone from abysmal to very accurate, and the remaining flaws are in shades of blue that almost always cause monitors trouble. If you care about color quality, you really do need to calibrate the Acer as without a calibration, the colors are just far from ideal.
After that calibration we target 100 nits, which is more likely to be used with print or paper work than with on screen design work. We don’t get quite as good of results here, and the grayscale error is a good bit higher than before as well. It isn’t poor, but it’s not as good as other monitors can do, but this display also isn’t targeted towards print professionals.
So we have really poor initial color, very nice post-calibration color, and so-so calibration color for print work. If you really care about color quality then you’re going to want to calibrate it, and even if you don’t the level of error is high enough that it might be a bit distracting, especially since the grayscale is so bad.
The gamut is supposed to be sRGB and here it comes up just a little bit short. We look for 71% of AdobeRGB to be equal to sRGB, but we only get 68% of the AdobeRGB gamut here. This also comes in near the bottom of the monitors recently reviewed, and isn’t too unexpected due to the LED lighting which often falls short.
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