Thursday 07 Feb 2008
- platform Mac, Windows
- price £1,349 plus VAT
- company Eizo
- pros Exceptional picture quality: accurate with great colour depth.
- cons More expensive than rivals. Tilt mechanism is stiff.
- rating
The FlexScan SX3031W is the first 30-inch display to offer more than eight-bit image processing for greater colour depth and more accurate colour rendering.
This isn’t the only reason to pay around £250 more for the SX3031W than rival models, though, as it has many appealing features – and its quality is more than worth the price.
The combination of a 12-bit Look-Up Table (LUT) and 16-bit internal processing means that the SX3031W gives a more precise representation of how your images and designs will appear on final output. Eizo’s display is also capable of outputting more colours than its rivals, and the company claims that its monitor reproduces 97 per cent of the Adobe RGB colour space.
In our tests, the SX3031W’s performance lives up to its promise. It features the widest colour gamut in the group, and images appear with far better rendering of subtle shades and details, especially in very dark and light areas. Before calibration, the monitor’s output was impressive; after profiling, it was near-as-damnit perfect.
The SX3031W is the only monitor here to offer a choice of colour temperature presets, which helps calibration be more accurate by altering the colour output characteristics. A simple menu gives control over colour temperature, brightness and Gamma (another feature found on the SX3031W alone).
The monitor’s shell is fine but not stylish; it can swivel and has a large tilt radius, though it’s rather stiff and you worry about knocking the monitor over by pushing too hard.
Neil Bennett
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Question of the day!
Neil Bennett
Editor
Do you share your creations online?