BenQ EW277HDR

Interlace pattern artifacts

On some monitors faint interlace patterns can be seen during certain transitions, particularly noticeable where light shades (muzzle flashes, explosions etc.) briefly pop up on the screen. These are sometimes referred to as ‘inversions artifacts’. Alternatively, static interlace patterns can be seen with some shades appearing as faint horizontal bands of a slightly lighter and slightly darker version of the intended shade. We did not observe any such patterns, either dynamic or static, on this model.

Responsiveness

Input lag

A utility called SMTT 2.0 was used alongside a sensitive camera to compare the latency of the EW277HDR with various monitors of known input lag. We took over 30 repeat readings to maximise accuracy. Using this method, we measured 4.15ms (~1/4 of a frame at 60Hz) of input lag. This reading was similar at 75Hz. This value is influenced both by the element of input lag that you see (pixel responsiveness) and that which you feel (signal delay). It indicates a very low signal delay that even sensitive users shouldn’t find problematic. Using the HDR emulation mode (with SMTT 2.0, which is SDR content), we measured a marginally higher value of 6.78ms. Note that we have no way to accurately measure input lag of the monitor running with HDR content.

Perceived blur (pursuit photography)

In our responsiveness article we explore the factors which influence monitor responsiveness. One of the key concepts explored is ‘perceived blur’, caused predominantly by eye movement as motion is followed on a screen. Pixel responsiveness also contributes to this. We also explore a technique called ‘pursuit photography’, which uses a moving rather than stationary camera to capture motion in a way that reflects both eye (camera) movement and pixel responsiveness. This is a 60Hz monitor and 75Hz is not a listed refresh rate. Like many Full HD monitors of this sort, however, it can be ‘overclocked’ to run at 75Hz without issue. Refer to the proceeding section for information about that.

The images below are pursuit photographs taken using the UFO Motion Test for ghosting, with the test running at the default speed of 960 pixels per second and the monitor set to 60Hz. This is a good practical speed for such photography, highlighting the key elements of perceived blur nicely. The UFO moves across the screen from left to right at a frame rate matching the refresh rate of the display. All background shade levels (dark, medium and light) were used and all three ‘AMA’ (‘Advanced Motion Acceleration’) settings on the monitor were tested. The final image shows a 60Hz reference monitor (Dell S2417DG) which offers rapid pixel responses without resorting to overly aggressive pixel overdrive. This gives a good idea of what to expect in this test where pixel responsiveness isn’t really a limiting factor.



In all cases the UFO appears soft and unfocused, reflecting a moderate degree of perceived blur due to eye movement and linked to the 60Hz refresh rate of the display. There are also varying degrees of trailing behind the object, due to weaknesses in pixel responsiveness. With ‘AMA’ set to ‘Off’, this trailing is quite bold and for the dark background in particular rather extensive. The light background fares much better. With ‘AMA’ set to ‘High’, the trailing is slightly reduced for the dark background and to some extent the medium background. It is again lightest for the light background, although there now appears to be a ‘glow’ behind the UFO. This is overshoot (inverse ghosting) due to aggressive pixel overdrive being used to speed up the transitions. Setting ‘AMA’ to ‘Premium’ provides much stronger and more obvious overshoot, affecting all transitions with a very eye-catching inky trail for the dark background in particular. The image below shows the same test performed at 75Hz.



The UFO still appears soft and unfocused, although is now marginally narrower (this is clearest if you focus on the cockpit area). There is therefore still a moderate degree of perceived blur due to eye movement, with a slight reduction compared to 60Hz. There is again varying degrees of trailing behind the object, due to weaknesses in pixel responsiveness. The pattern of either trailing or overshoot is similar to at 60Hz, although the trailing is slightly more pronounced in places. That is because the refresh rate and frame rate has increased (by 15Hz and 15fps) and perceived blur due to eye movement has decreased slightly (the object appears narrower). The pixel responses aren’t keeping up, which as why there is trailing, and weaknesses are exposed a bit more clearly. Whether at 60Hz or 75Hz, we consider the default ‘High’ setting for ‘AMA’ to be optimal.

Running a custom resolution (overclocking)

We used a Custom Resolution in Nvidia Control Panel (all timings etc. left at automatic) to set the monitor to 75Hz. This was supported with no image quality degradation or other issues, so we consider this a ‘comfortable’ overclock. There was were a few Hz of headroom above that as well, but much higher provided obvious softening to the image so we wouldn’t advise trying to set the monitor much above this. When it comes to overclocking, mileage may vary and there are no guarantees. Also note that HDR will not work with the monitor set to a refresh rate higher than 60Hz. The video below shows you how to create a custom resolution for the monitor with a higher refresh rate than the default of 60Hz.

In our experience we consider this sort of increase in refresh rate to be a ‘mild’ overclock that is completely within manufacturer tolerances. There is minimal risk involved and in all likelihood the monitor will last for its useful life in much the same way as if it was run at 60Hz. The general advice we give at this stage as to be aware that overclocking is something which you do at your own risk. We accept no liability should anything happen to the monitor which may or may not be due to running it at an increased refresh rate.

Responsiveness in games and movies

On Battlefield 1 (BF1), running the monitor at 75Hz provided some advantages over 60Hz, where the frame rate kept up. The most noticeable aspect was an increase in ‘connected feel’ as you interact with the game, particularly using the mouse where precision and fluid feeling is improved. There was also a slight decrease in perceived blur overall, with many pixel transitions occurring fast enough to make good use of the refresh rate. There was a little bit of overshoot where some lighter shades were involved in the transitions, giving a ‘snail slime’ trail in places that appeared semi-transparent and lighter than either the background or object colour. But we did not find this eye-catching. As with all VA models, though, there were also some weaknesses in pixel responsiveness. As highlighted with ‘Test UFO’ earlier, these were most prominent where dark shades were involved in the transition. This ‘smeary trailing’ was not as widespread or as obvious as we’ve seen on some models – there wasn’t an obvious smoke-like quality to the trailing – but they were weaknesses nonetheless. Many VA models suffer from what we call ‘break-up’ trailing. This is whereby some dark shades appear with a trailing that contains a noticeable hue of some of the shades that they contain. On this game, for example, there are some very dark brown woody tones that appear almost black when they’re static (they’re very dark), but the trailing appears with a dark red hue. This was nowhere near as extreme or as eye-catching as what some VA models would produce. The section of our video review below explores some of the weaknesses in pixel responsiveness on this model. It also points out that they exist regardless of refresh rate.

Overall, we’d say that the monitor is significantly more responsive than the likes of the AOC Q3279VWF. The pixel responsiveness is also a bit more tightly-tuned (generally faster) than previous Full HD VA models we’ve tested from BenQ, such as the EW2750ZL). It’s a bit closer to the Samsung C27F591FD, which we feel really sets the benchmark for Full HD VA pixel responsiveness. We made similar observations on Dirt Rally. The 75Hz refresh rate improved ‘connected feel’ and lowered perceived blur overall, with many pixel transitions occurring fast enough to take advantage of this. There were some weaknesses, including a small amount of overshoot in places which gave a little bit of bright trailing in places where some lighter transitions were involved. Seeing trees moving against a bright sky, for example, sometimes gave a bit of overshoot – but nothing too bright or eye-catching. There were some distinct weaknesses where darker transitions were involved, for example dark and shaded areas of forest or more commonly when driving at night. There was a bit of a ‘smeary’ trailing in places, for example where dark shadowy trees were cast against a somewhat brighter night sky. This wasn’t as extensive or obvious as some VA models provide and any ‘break-up’ trailing was pretty tame without obvious flashes of colour.

We also tested our Blu-ray film titles. These run at ~24fps and therefore don’t require such snappy pixel responses as higher frame rate content, such as the games we tested above. Note that higher frame rate movie content (e.g. 60fps) exposes similar weaknesses to our game testing. There were no distinct weaknesses when viewing this ~24fps film content, with the frame rate itself being the main barrier to its fluidity. There was a very small degree of ‘break-up’ trailing we noticed where some slight red hues could be observed around rich brown objects, but this was slight and not something we found bothersome.

HDR (High Dynamic Range)

When it comes to displays, HDR (High Dynamic Range) describes the ability to distinctly display very deep dark shades and very bright light shades simultaneously. It is also necessary for a display to be able to display a large variety of shades in between, from weakly saturated to very heavily saturated shades. To achieve this, it would be attractive for a monitor to have hundreds if not more dimming zones on the backlight – something referred to as FALD (Full Array Local Dimming). In an ideal world it would be able to control the brightness of each pixel individually (OLED technology, for example). This capability would allow the monitor to correctly display intricate mixtures of bright and dark content. Some sections of the screen could display dark content with suitably low brightness luminance, whilst other sections of the screen display brighter shades with brilliant luminance. When it comes to colour reproduction on an HDR monitor, the ultimate goal is coverage of a huge colour gamut; Rec. 2020. A more achievable near-term aim is for a monitor to offer 90%+ DCI-P3 (a Digital Cinema Initiatives standard colour space). Finally, it is required that the display offers (at least) 10-bits per channel for colour processing, giving it the precision required to appropriately map shades for HDR content.

For most games and other full screen applications that support HDR, the BenQ EW277HDR will automatically switch into its HDR mode when the appropriate setting is selected in the game/application itself. If an application is running in HDR mode then you can’t manually disable HDR on the monitor, even using the shiny copper-coloured button. This will just control ‘B.I.+’ in an HDR environment and can also control the HDR emulation mode in an SDR environment. As usual for a monitor, it is specifically the ‘HDR10’ pipeline that is supported. With the Windows 10 ‘Creator’s update’, Microsoft added a feature called ‘HDR and advanced colour’. Some game titles will only run in HDR once this setting is activated in Windows. And if you wish to view HDR movies in a compatible web browser, for example, you would need to activate this setting as well. It will make the desktop itself look flooded and washed out so should only really be activated when it’s specifically needed. You can find this setting in ‘Display settings’ (right click on the desktop) as shown in the image below.

We’ve used a range of monitors which tout various degrees of HDR capability and some are clearly better than others. A lot depends on whether the monitor has the hardware inside it to tick those ‘HDR checkboxes’ that were covered at the start of this section. The EW277HDR offers something that is better than a pure HDR emulation mode, but which fall short of a true HDR experience in some key areas. Starting off with the colour gamut, this comes close to DCI-P3 as we’ve already explored. As this is the near-term standard for HDR, it’s the gamut that most HDR content creators have in mind when they’re creating their content. Although we’re focusing on PC games for this section, our observations here are indicative of what you can expect when watching HDR movies and also when playing games on HDR capable games consoles. HDR implementations vary from title to title and some are better than others. We tested a range of titles using HDR on this monitor, including Hitman and Battlefield 1. We’ve used both of these titles extensively in our testing of other HDR monitors, so we know that they can put HDR screens to good use and highlight distinct strengths and weaknesses in HDR performance.

Because the colour gamut the developers have in mind for HDR content is DCI-P3 rather than sRGB, you’ll notice that some shades appear less saturated with HDR enabled. That’s because shades are mapped more accurately to the gamut rather than stretched further out than intended – in other words, the screen can make better use of its fairly generous colour gamut. Some earthy browns have less of a red hue and some of the lush greens look less vivid but more natural. The strong variety of shades is maintained, and where appropriate the developer is free to inject a good dose of vibrancy. Shades appear here and there which are clearly beyond the boundaries of sRGB and closer to the periphery of the DCI-P3 gamut. Licks of vibrant orange and red in roaring fires and colourful purple and yellow flowers are examples of this. The image below shows the colour gamut of the monitor (red triangle) compared to the sRGB colour space (green triangle). Just as a reminder of the over-extension beyond sRGB that’s offered by this model, natively.

Colour gamut 'Test Settings'

Another important area of HDR is contrast. Your ideal HDR display will be able to simultaneously display very brilliant bright shades and very deep dark shades, with strong distinctions in between. This requires per-pixel illumination, ideally, or failing that a good number of dimming zones for the backlight. This model offers more of a simple backlight solution, which is typical of relatively inexpensive HDR-capable displays such as this. As noted in the contrast section the monitor doesn’t have a large number of dimming zones, it’s limited to just a few. The maximum luminance is enhanced (we recorded 418 cd/m² with HDR vs. 321 cd/m² without) whilst black depth stays the same. Given that a VA panel is used, the black depth is decent enough to avoid making the image look flooded. But under HDR, where there are bright shades displayed, we found the overall scene looked noticeably bright. Not just the light shades, but all of the dark shades as well. This is an obvious limitation that there is no way around, if you don’t have a good number of dimming zones (or per-pixel illumination) to play with. Dark shades did not appear as rich and deep as they should. Even where very dark content dominated, the black depth never seemed to fall much below what it would do under SDR with a moderately high brightness setting used. The bright shades weren’t as bright and brilliant as we’ve seen on some HDR displays, either, but we don’t feel they were exactly lacking in this area. Had the overall contrast been stronger (i.e. the dark shades deeper) they probably would have stood out better. On the plus side, the changes in backlight brightness were relatively subtle – so this didn’t feel like a jarring dynamic contrast mode, thankfully. Some users might find this increased brightness gives the sort of experience they’re after, especially if they haven’t seen HDR on more capable displays. But for us, we’d actually prefer if the monitor simply offered an ‘HDR gamut mapping’ option that could make better use of the DCI-P3 colour gamut. But which just left the backlight alone with manual adjustment, like under SDR.

It’s also important to note that the panel used on this monitor is a true 8-bit panel and does not support higher bit depths, using dithering or otherwise. When the monitor runs in HDR, a 12-bit colour signal is used by the GPU as this (10-bit+ per channel) is a requirement for HDR content. This is then mapped (compressed) to an 8-bit output stream on the monitor itself. This didn’t make as much of a difference as you might expect given the numbers, but that’s because the other capabilities of the monitor don’t really warrant a higher native bit depth. It might have helped with more accurate mapping of the colour gamut, although the overall saturation levels are really what most users will notice in that respect. Where that could be most noticeable would be for closely matching dark shades or very bright shades, where subtle differences could potentially be enhanced by a higher bit depth and any gradients between tones smoother out. For this to really be useful, though, the extremes of contrast would have to be greater. A VA panel with a fairly normal black point and reasonably high but not extreme maximum luminance doesn’t really warrant that sort of precision. Overall, then, the HDR capabilities of the monitor are quite limited. It’s really putting the colour gamut to good use and a slightly higher maximum luminance that define the experience. Finally, note that the monitor will not run above 60Hz under HDR.

Video review

The video below summarises some of the key points raised in this written review and shows the monitor in action. The video review is designed to complement the written piece and is not nearly as comprehensive.

Conclusion

HDR (High Dynamic Range) has become a popular buzzword amongst manufacturers and is something that many consumers look for in a monitor. Unfortunately, as with many buzz words, it has become overused and has largely lost its meaning. There is a huge spectrum of performance when it comes to HDR, with some implementations being rather good and others being anything but. The BenQ EW277HDR even has ‘HDR’ in its name and whilst it didn’t have the worst HDR implementation we’ve seen, it missed out ticks in a lot of boxes as well. The setting did allow the monitor to reach a higher peak luminance without affecting the black point. Although the whole point in HDR would be to achieve a very deep black point for some sections of the image whilst outputting extreme luminance in others. In this case the peak luminance wasn’t exactly extreme, either, but it was still what we would describe as bright. Many users who aren’t used to better HDR implementations and who like some extra brightness may find this one to be an enjoyable addition. The other headline feature, ‘Brightness Intelligence Plus’, has a shiny copper-coloured quick-access button shared between HDR and itself. But as with HDR, we find the feature fell flat in practice and was something we preferred to leave disabled.

But none of this should take away from the monitor’s core performance, which is really what’s important here. And given the fairly keen pricing, any headline features are only ever going to be the cherries on the cake. Not even the icing. After a few adjustments, the monitor provided a vibrant and well-balanced image. BenQ and panel manufacture AU Optronics have carried over their ‘very light matte’ anti-glare screen surface, which keeps the image pleasingly smooth and helps vibrancy potential as well. The colour gamut of this model was significantly increased compared to its predecessors. It was not able to cover Adobe RGB, nor was it aiming for that. Instead, it offered good DCI-P3 coverage. This gave a vivid and saturated (but still largely believable) look to the image which we feel many users will appreciate. It was also an appropriate gamut to target for HDR, with content developers creating their HDR content with DCI-P3 in mind as their near-term target. As is usual for a VA panel, there was some loss of saturation towards the flanks and bottom of the screen. But there was as little of this as we’ve observed on a VA panel of anything approaching this sort of size. The image therefore had good vibrancy throughout.

The contrast performance was also pleasing. This is something you’d hope for from a VA panel, but even then there is a bit of wiggle room and things can go a bit wrong. Static contrast actually slightly exceeded the specified 3000:1, even following the adjustments made to our ‘Test Settings’. The contrast was slightly increased for HDR content, to just above 4000:1 – but this difference is not dramatic enough to bring about a true HDR experience. The contrast experience was rounded off by the aforementioned screen surface, which kept things free from any real graininess. But also by the notable lack of obtrusive ‘glow’ – many VA models of this sort of size, particularly but not exclusively where the screen is curved, tend to have more noticeable VA glow than observed here. Responsiveness was also largely pleasing, with low input lag and most pixel transitions being fast enough for an optimal performance at 60Hz. And also a bit beyond; we were able to overclock the monitor to 75Hz on our system, giving a bit of an edge in terms of felt responsiveness and perceived blur. As is usual for VA panels, there were some distinct weaknesses in terms of pixel responsiveness that contributed to perceived blur. Some extra trailing where darker shades were involved in the transitions. This was not extreme and, overall, we felt performance in this area was improved compared to previous Full HD VA models we’ve used. The exception being the Samsung C27F591FD, which this model came pretty close to really and that sets something of a benchmark for ~60Hz Full HD VA panels. There was no distracting overshoot to speak of either, with the monitor faring better than the Samsung model in that respect.

The monitor may not whet the appetite of those looking for a solid HDR experience, even if it does offer a degree of support for HDR content. It may not please those who were hoping the ‘Brightness Intelligence Plus’ (B.I.+) feature would actually be intelligent, or indeed useful at all. It may also annoy some with its lack of flexibility, something that is expected from the ‘EW series predecessors to this model. You’ve got a tilt-only stand and no VESA holes to be found. And the pixel density and resolution is far from stellar. But it’s easy to criticise rather than focus on the strengths, which on this model we feel overshadow its weaknesses quite considerably. Especially when price is factored in. If you’re after a monitor for all-round use with a bit of gaming mixed in and you like strong contrast with vibrant-looking colours, you could do a lot worse than the BenQ EW277HDR.

The bottom line; looking past the headline features and the shiny copper-coloured button that allows quick access to them, this monitor provides strong all-round performance with pleasing contrast and vibrant but not gaudy colour output.

 

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