ViewSonic VP2772 review

The VP2772 from ViewSonic is a gentle update to last year’s VP2770-LED display. Both are 27in widescreen IPS monitors, boasting a healthy resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. See also Group test: what’s the best display?

These are meant to be serious low-frills designs aimed at designers using Windows on a budget, although at around £600 this monitor still represents a large investment.

The display is labelled SuperClear by ViewSonic, a reference to the AH-IPS panel from LG. This has a matt anti-glare hard coating, making it useable in most lighting conditions. The black bezel is similarly matt finished, an important touch for any practical screen.

Unlike the earlier VP2770-LED model, the VP2772 now relies on an external power supply, a laptop-style little brick on a cable, which we find a backward step in usability. A potential step forward is the specified 99 percent coverage of the AdobeRGB gamut, and 10-bit colour compatibility.

The latter feature points this monitor strongly toward the Windows rather than Mac user, since there is no support for 10-bit colour with current Mac hardware or OS X Mavericks. See all 25-inch and bigger displays.

Also indicating a preference for the Windows audience is how dreadful the image quality appears when first set up in OS X. This was resolved after adjusting the screen’s Sharpness control. There are just four settings here – labelled 0, 25, 50, 100 – and the default setting of ’50’ rendered on-screen text very poorly, over-sharpened and highlighting sub-pixel rendering colour artefacts. The ‘0′ setting looked too defocused, while ’25’ was about right.

As a monitor aimed at professionals, the VP2770 has a fully adjustable stand, and it can be raised to sufficient height to enable the screen to swivel 90 degrees for use in portrait mode.

The monitor touch-sensitive controls, sited on the lower right of the sceen bezel, are poorly designed. These adopt the system found on budget consumer displays of relying on four buttons to navigate through every screen menu.

ViewSonic VP2772 review: Performance

In our standard chequerboard test for contrast ratio, the VP2772 met a consistent 560:1 result at 50, 75 and 100 percent brightness settings. The tone response was not so even, deviating slightly to 2.1 from the calibrated 2.2 gamma at lower brightness levels below around 40 percent brightness.

For colour accuracy (Delta-E) and colour gamut coverage, we recorded very strange numbers from our Spyder4 screen calibrator (Delta-E avg 13.25; 89% sRGB, 69% AdobeRGB) which we believe to be anomalous and not indicative of actual performance.

Luminance uniformity reached a maximum deviation of 14 percent (top left corner, 50% brightness). Most quadrants were kept within good 10 percent limits. We were unable to test the 10-bit credentials of this monitor.

This display may not suit the most parsimonious users, reaching 62 W power consumption at full brightness (a high 334 cd/m^2). This figure fell to 39 W at a more realistic 120 cd/m^2 brightness setting.