NEC PA271W Professional LCD Monitor Review
Subjective Analysis
While DisplayMate lays out a monitor's performance in black and white (and blue and green and red and...), we also take into consideration a subjective analysis. After all, you're not purchasing a monitor to view test patterns for hours on end. To see how the PA271W performs in the real world, we viewed a series of high definition movies and fired up a few games. Torturous, we know, but hey, you guys are worth every minute of our entertainment.
Clash of the Titans @ 1080P
To gauge the PA271W's movie viewing moxie, we loaded up a handful of HD movies and trailers, including Transformers 2 and Clash of the Titans (as pictured above). We wanted to see how NEC's panel would handle both dark and brightly lit scenes, and as expected, the 10-bit panel flexed its muscle here. Scenes came to life on the screen and did the movie clips justice.
Dirt 2
One of the things about IPS panels is that they traditionally have struggled with gaming chores, especially fast moving scenes where ghosting or streaking might come into play. Recent advances have addressed this issue and things are much improved today. Nevertheless, we were skeptical that the PA271W would have the chops to pull off gaming duties with little or no issue.
As it turns out, our skepticism was unfounded. While hardcore gamers with eagle eyes might be able to find a flaw or two, the PA271W did a serviceable job with fast moving games. Do note, however, that the native resolution is 2560x1440, and if you plan to play games at that res, you're going to need to a beefy videocard (or multiple GPUs). To its credit, the panel looked good while gaming at 1920x1080, which spoke to its ability to scale images outside of the confine of it's native resolution.
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Clash of the Titans @ 1080P
To gauge the PA271W's movie viewing moxie, we loaded up a handful of HD movies and trailers, including Transformers 2 and Clash of the Titans (as pictured above). We wanted to see how NEC's panel would handle both dark and brightly lit scenes, and as expected, the 10-bit panel flexed its muscle here. Scenes came to life on the screen and did the movie clips justice.
Dirt 2
One of the things about IPS panels is that they traditionally have struggled with gaming chores, especially fast moving scenes where ghosting or streaking might come into play. Recent advances have addressed this issue and things are much improved today. Nevertheless, we were skeptical that the PA271W would have the chops to pull off gaming duties with little or no issue.
As it turns out, our skepticism was unfounded. While hardcore gamers with eagle eyes might be able to find a flaw or two, the PA271W did a serviceable job with fast moving games. Do note, however, that the native resolution is 2560x1440, and if you plan to play games at that res, you're going to need to a beefy videocard (or multiple GPUs). To its credit, the panel looked good while gaming at 1920x1080, which spoke to its ability to scale images outside of the confine of it's native resolution.
