Nixeus VUE 30: 30" 2560x1600 IPS Monitor Review
by Chris Heinonen on August 20, 2013 6:00 AM ESTFor our pre-calibration measurements we target 200 cd/m2 of light output, the sRGB gamut, and a gamma of 2.2. On the VUE 30 there are color temperature settings you can use for the grayscale and the warm setting was found to produce the most accurate image.
I’m also going to approach this review differently than before. The charts for all these measurements will be available in individual galleries. There is a table at the top of the page that summarizes the pre and post calibration measurements to easily see how well the monitor does before and after calibration. This should make it easier to read, and allow me to better focus commentary about the monitor performance on the areas that need it.
| Pre-Calibration |
Post-Calibration, 200 cd/m2 |
Post-Calibration, 80 cd/m2 |
|
| White Level | 201.78 | 195.562 | 77.6183 |
| Black Level | 0.3214 | 0.3197 | 0.1388 |
| Contrast Ratio | 628:1 | 612:1 | 559:1 |
| Gamma (Average) | 2.2552 | 2.2406 | 2.5132 |
| Color Temperature | 6657K | 6593K | 6452K |
| Grayscale dE2000 | 4.0657 | 0.7705 | 1.3304 |
| Color Checker dE2000 | 5.7431 | 4.0627 | 4.3305 |
| Saturations dE2000 | 4.6853 | 3.7814 | 4.1323 |
The major improvement that we see is for the grayscale and gamma. On our 200 cd/m2 target calibration, those both come out nearly perfect. There is a small gamma spike at 95% but nothing really bad at all. The overall dE2000 is so low as to be unseen. When targeting 80 cd/m2 and the sRGB gamma curve, the Nixeus doesn’t perform quite as well. The gamma has a little more variation and the dE2000 is somewhat higher, though still very low. The loss of contrast ratio is the larger issue here.
Both grayscale results highly improve upon the original, which is slightly warm and has a very large error level as you approach peak white. The problem with the Nixeus VUE 30 lies with color reproduction. The errors for both the 96-point color checker and the saturations measurements improve, but not by a huge degree. Most of that improvement can be tied back to the grayscale improving since those numbers are a large part of these later tests. The default 6-point gamut chart is dropped here as the saturations chart covers that, and that dE2000 average is too heavily impacted by the grayscale data.
What we see is a wildly oversaturated gamut where green, cyan, red, yellow and magenta all fall far outside of the sRGB gamut boundary. With Green even the 60% saturation value is outside the sRGB gamut, which leads to very over-saturated colors. Even post-calibration we see that green dE2000 errors are past 5 from 40% on, and approaching a dE2000 of 10 by 100%. Aside from a few select colors in the Color Checker pattern, and the grayscale, almost all the colors have a large visible error.
The Nixeus lacks an internal LUT to fix this, and only so much can be done through the video card. A large gamut is nice, but just like with an OLED smartphone, we don’t want that gamut to be wildly oversaturated and push the color way outside of their boundaries. For any sort of color-critical work, or even just browsing photographs, the wild gamut of the VUE 30 will likely be a bad choice for those people after accurate colors. If you like a big, punchy image, you’ll probably like it.
Since we can’t control this gamut, perhaps using AdobeRGB as a target will lead to a better result? I decided to give it a try and see if that improves things at all, or if it was still an issue.
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Sabresiberian - Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - link
It is great to see prices drop this much, but the standard 30" screen still has a serious problem, in my eyes. .25mm dot pitch.Okay that isn't terrible; it's something I could live with. But the fact is, I can buy a 27" with much better dot pitch (.233mm) and spend a lot less money. I hate the 16:9, but it isn't as bad as .25mm for me in that large of a display, personally, so the trade-off means I'll go with spending less money to get something a bit closer to what I want.
Give me 16:10.
Give me at least (most?) .233mm dot pitch, - better certainly isn't an unreasonable thing to ask in this day and age.
Give me an IPS panel (or comparable, or, gasp even better!), preferably with a backlight solution that doesn't feel like a heat lamp shining on my face.
Give me accurate colors, a uniform display, screen surface that isn't too reflective OR to heavily anti-reflective, a thin bezel so I can put 3 of them side-by-side without big spaces between the displays..
Give me low lag.
Sell it to me for less than $600. Really, I think $500 isn't unreasonable, but I'll buy it at $600.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - link
Windows still doesn't handle odd DPI all that well, though 8.1 may improve this. As someone who has used 30" LCDs for years now, I will tell you that I have no issues with the dot pitch, and in fact I often have to increase the magnification to read text comfortably. I think a dot pitch for desktop displays of around 0.28-0.30mm is actually better for most people past 30 years old. For businesses with 40+ year old employees, I have had many instances where I had to set their 1080p or 1920x1200 display to run at a lower resolution because the user complained that the text was too small.So, sorry to burst your bubble, but in the larger market of the world (e.g. people older than 25) having higher DPI is not actually all that important or even desirable. Not to mention, if you had a 4K 25" display, you need GPUs capable of driving that resolution at a reasonable level of performance. Just like the business world doesn't worry too much about high DPI displays, they're not interested in high performance GPUs for general computer use either.
josephandrews222 - Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - link
GREAT comment about dot pitch and age. I'd like to see an anandtech article about dot pitch that addresses this very topic...in detail.Impulses - Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - link
These displays aren't marketed at the business world either tho...stephenbrooks - Friday, August 23, 2013 - link
Right on with the dot pitch comment. I recently got to work on a 27" 1440p display and felt I had to set the Windows 7 UI & font scaling to 125% rather than 100% (I'm 29). The side-effect was that 125% looked kind of "Mac like" with high res fonts still the same size, whereas 100% was like trying to work at a scale designed for ultraportable laptops.seapeople - Saturday, August 24, 2013 - link
I call BS. My eyesight is TERRIBLE. I can't see the broadside of a barn if it was flying at me and mooing. But I have these wonderful things called glasses. It's not like glasses stop working when you get older. I currently am sitting about 24 inches from my 125 ppi laptop screen and I can still tell that the text is not nearly as clear as it could be (i.e., on the retina iPad). For example, > ... that's not a smooth, clean arrow, it's a blocky/fuzzy travesty that would look so much better with more pixels in it.menting - Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - link
Does this monitor use PWM for brightness?I wish more monitor reviews would cover this section as well, as I (and quite a few others) find PWM annoying and tiring to the eyes
mdrejhon - Wednesday, August 21, 2013 - link
You can test a monitor's PWM by using http://www.testufo.com/#test=blurtrailmdrejhon - Wednesday, August 21, 2013 - link
Oh, and when testing TestUFO, make sure to use the Chrome browser, and lower brightness to 0% to check for the PWM artifact.ezridah - Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - link
You should review the 4 different Monoprice monitors. They have 2 types at each size and the low end ones are significantly cheaper than this.