Contrast Ratio & Brightness

Monitor Contrast Ratio & Brightness

The past year or so we have been slowly testing gaming monitors. So in the charts below you can see a handful of gaming screens from other brands comapred to the one in todays review. Today's test monitor is highlighted in the charts in light-blue. 

Contrast ratio

Here we perform a simple contrast test, which is a difficult yet realistic one. Contrast ratio is the ratio between the amount of light coming from the screen when it is displaying bright white, and the amount of light when it is supposed to be display pure black. Overall LCD monitors have contrast ratios ranging from roughly 150:1 to 800:1. For your daily applications like photo editing and office one could consider 400:1 or higher a fairly good contrast. Thing is, if you watch a movie from such a monitor in a darkened environment, you will still notice that "black is not really black". A good example here (although much better anno 2014)  are laptop monitors, these often have fairly low contrast ratios (150:1 when viewed straight-on and below 80:1 at relatively small angles). The measurement is done with a series of test images with the black and white luminosity values measured. We use the fairly simple to use Lagom methodology which uses a digital camera to photograph calculate contrast ratio values.

Overall the monitor  screens shows a good number. The contrast ratio is a property of a display system, defined as the ratio of the luminance of the brightest color (white) to that of the darkest color (black) that the system is capable of producing. A high contrast ratio is a desired aspect of any display. At default settings the screen has good contrast levels.

Maximum Brightness

In order to see how well a monitor behaves in heavy lit areas with a lot of sun we look at Maximum Brightness. You can measure the output quite easily. Overall the screen shows a normal brightness level.