Performance Analysis

Starting with an initial subjective image test, the first thing we noticed were the poor viewing angles, although that’s always expected with a TN panel. If you’re not looking at the screen dead on, you’re probably going to notice distortion pretty quickly. Thankfully, there was no sign of backlight bleed, and images overall looked satisfying if a little lacking in contrast and depth.

Moving to the colorimeter results, it’s an excellent start with full sRGB gamut coverage – we can’t ask for anything more.

Contrast, as expected, comes out on the low side, even for a less expensive screen. This is perhaps the weakest element of the screen in that it is actually noticeable. The default white point is slightly blue-tinged at 7,800K, and although the preset values vary wildly from what they purport to be, the User setting hits a very nice sweet spot with a close-to-ideal white point of 6,700K and a boosted contrast ratio to match.

The results on colour accuracy are great; an average delta E value of less than 2 is fantastic and wouldn’t be out of place on much more expensive screens. Likewise, the gamma curve is absolutely spot on and one of the best we’ve seen. Post-calibration, we were able to improve the depth of images, and skin tones looked a little less pasty as well, but we don’t expect many people buying this screen will be the sort to calibrate it, so it’s good that out of the box it’s already a strong showing.

Uniformity is let down by the bottom left corner for both luminance and colour, but this isn’t quite as important for a gaming-focussed screen, and actually the majority of the panel is illuminated with surprising consistency.

Gaming on this monitor is a truly lovely experience. FreeSync works as advertised, although it does add a tiny smidgen of ghosting that we weren’t able to eliminate with the OSD settings. Still, it’s much better playing with FreeSync enabled, and the high refresh rate keeps things feeling super responsive too.

Conclusion

We reckon 27” 1440p is a bit of an underrated sweet spot for gaming, striking a great balance of sharpness and size while placing much less stress on your GPU than 4K does. Coupled with a very high and variable refresh rate, the gaming experience could hardly be better here. The worry, then, was that image quality would suffer on account of this being so surprisingly inexpensive, but as shown that’s simply not true. Sure, it’s not perfect, but viewing angles aren’t usually a concern for a primary gaming monitor, and the screen is capable of better contrast than it has out of the box.

Physically, there’s definitely some work to be done. If Element Gaming can tweak the stand to be little stronger, add VESA mounting, and perhaps include just a bit of physical adjustment, the next version will be exceptional. The quality of the joystick and menu could do with a bump as well. However, with the value proposition here as strong as it is and image quality mostly holding out, we’re more than happy to recommend this monitor, and it would be an especially powerful gaming experience upgrade for those stuck on a standard 1080p 60Hz panel with no FreeSync (or something similar).