By default the monitor has 77% brightness and 50% contrast (these settings correspond to the Standard mode in the list of factory-set modes). I reduced them both to 35% to achieve a 100nit white. You should not increase the contrast setting above 55% as it leads to a loss of lights, which merge into the same white color. The brightness is regulated by modulating the power of the backlight lamps at a frequency of 240Hz.
Color gradients are reproduced perfectly, without banding, irrespective of the contrast setting.
The average brightness uniformity on white is 4.8% with a maximum deflection of 12.0%. That’s a good result. Alas, the backlight is more irregular on black – 6.8% on average and 25.6% at the maximum – with bright areas along the top and bottom of the screen. These are not poor results, yet a black screen is visibly irregular in a dim room.
The gamma curves look good at the default settings. They are not far from the theoretical curve and have no slumps or twists in the area of darks or lights.
The color gamut coincides with the standard sRGB space in blues, surpasses it in greens, and loses to it in reds. This is the normal gamut of a modern LCD monitor, except for few models that feature LED-based backlighting or backlight lamps with improved phosphors that deliver a much larger color gamut.
The monitor doesn’t have response time compensation and its specified response was measured on the black-white-black transition every modern TN matrix performs very quickly. The average response time measured on transitions between different levels of gray is not low at 13.0 milliseconds (GtG), being many times that of RTC-enabled monitors. The maximum response is as high as 22 milliseconds.
The color temperature setup is very sloppy. The image is very cold in each mode. Calling a temperature of 8000-9000K “Warm” sounds like a joke to me.
The brightness and contrast ratio are normal for monitors of this class.
As I wrote above, the monitor offers four presets that go under the name of Empowering Technology. To check out their practical worth I measured the brightness, contrast ratio and color reproduction accuracy in each of the available modes.
A brightness of 80-100nits is considered acceptable for working with text. This is somewhat lower than the value offered by the AL2016WBsd in the appropriate mode. In other words, the monitor is going to be somewhat too bright for processing text unless you’ve got very bright ambient lighting.
The Standard mode is the same as the monitor’s default settings. It is going to suit just fine for playing games and watching movies. The Graphics and Movies modes do not seem to differ much from it, so why do you need them? Let’s look at the gamma curve diagrams.
That’s a rather depressing sight. The levels of green and red are so high in the Graphics mode that light halftones are all displayed as the same color. The blue curve has an odd twist in the middle of the diagram. With such gross distortions of colors this mode is obviously not suitable for viewing graphics.
It’s even worse in the Movie mode: all the three curves are higher now, and the reproduction of colors is worsened. But as you’ve seen above, the Movie mode doesn’t differ from the Standard mode in terms of image brightness.
So, I can’t say that Empowering Technology is utterly useless, but only two out of the four modes have any practical worth, namely Standard and Text. The other two modes distort color reproduction and provide no advantages instead. I guess most users will manually select a proper brightness for working with text, switch into the Text mode for viewing photos, and enable the Standard mode for games and movies.
Highs:
Lows:
- Plain exterior design
- Slow matrix
- Sloppy color reproduction setup
Recommended usage:
- Text-based applications (documents, spreadsheets, Internet)
