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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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"