ASUS ROG Swift PG279QE Review

Updated to reflect replacement monitor.Pros: Generally good colours if tweaked (Red 97, Green 92, Blue 100), viewing angles are acceptable for a TN (though not from below – and you’d not want to run this 90deg rotated as ‘below’ would be ‘from left’) however original monitor that was shipped had a noticeable yellow tinge towards top of screen is noticeableWickedly smoothLess input lag than my old Samsung 226BWs – the only good panel I’ve used since my awesome Panasonic 19″ CRT bit the dust 10 years ago – I actually have two 226BWs and they are very similar in viewing experience.StylishNice matt screen finish.Cons:Adjusting the Colour Temp, for personal preference, is great unless you then apply the Blue Light filter in the evening as this has the effect of wiping your preferred Colour Temp. and it resets the R,G & B values back to 100 – this means that every day after using this feature you’re going to have to reset your preference. That’s rather poor in my book.Light In Motion is just the one colur as opposed to previous incarnations and the 24.5″ model I believe.And now for the failure and why I returned the first monitor that was shipped:In the Windows environment:I inititally setup my GPU brightness with Windows colorcpl.exe as the NVidia panel caused severe banding of colours in game if I set it to look right in Windows, however it was still far too bright when viewing a Browser page (such as this). I tried all games modes but had to set the monitor to 0 Brightness in all. nb the black ‘X’ in the colorcpl.exe setup was always very visible.I settled omn using the default ‘Racing’ mode.nb – PG248Q.icm from the Asus disc was installed and is showing in Windows.Still using the Windows colorcpl.exe, I could not get it to satisfactorily calibrate Brightness/Contrast/Gamma using the Lagom test screens as reference- if I got one to look correct then at least two of the rest were wrong. It was also still quite bright when looking at a predominantly white web page in a daylit room (and too really bright at night even with Blue light filtering) and I found myself leaning back away from the screen to cope.With the Asus in In Racing Mode and with it’s Gamma set to 2.2, Colours tweaked as above(Red 97, Green 92, Blue 100), Brightness at 0 and contrast at 54, no Blue Light filter, no OD, no Dark Boost and no Adaptive control and using the DisplayPort connection (incidentally, HDMI was similarly bright) and, still with the Windows colorcpl.exe, the Lagom Gamma test was showing 1.7 (I simply cannot get a higher value (ie lower down the bar) no matter what I did); the first two in the top row of black squares in the Black Level test were missing; and just about see the 1st bar in the Contrast test; White Level is pure white from 248 onwards with 247 only barely perceiveble if you scroll the screen up/down; Gradient Banding test was fairly good.With this overall setup, and still in Windows. Just to mention, I do like a dark environment to work/game in but I have only just bought my first pair of prescription sunglasses and am happy with brightness outdoors in general.In a Game environment:Now, the above might have worked for Windows but it left me rather in the dark in Game. So I went back to the NVidia panel and found that, keeping the monitor’s settings the same (Brightness still at 0 etc), if I were to set the nVidia panel to Brightness 30%, Contrast 50% and Gamma 1.02 would give me a good gaming experience but would again leave me with an overly bright screen when returning to Windows (why this should be when neither of my 226BWs did this is beyond me). The results in the Lagom test now were most peculiar and very poor indeed- only 4 Black squares visible out 20!; White Saturation 253 was just about perceivable – the only test to have improved; Gamma was about the same at abnout 1.7; Contrast seemed to lose bars 2 or 3 and below. Unless I’m doing something wildly wrong then clearly this particular monitor cannot cope with full-screen games and fulfil a passable experience in Windows without two different settings (and even then is still too bright) which is not really satisfactory IMHO.Some extra detail – if I drop the nVidia brightness to 20 – a bit more comfortable then I’m down to 2 Black square in the Lagom test.All my tweaking above did not change the yellow tinge, in fact it became more apparant due to one’s focus on trying to acheive a good result. I took 4 shots: a shot of a fullscreen blank Notepad which I split and flipped to show the gradual tint, however this didn’t really convey the problem fully so I attached three shots of a quick Excel sheet with 3 pairs of random colour blocks and took pictures from above, straight on and one from below to show that it wasn’t a viewing angle thing (in fact the ‘from below view’ was horrible!).And as for the replacement:Much easier to setup, though brightness is still dialled right down – probably made easier in part due to all of the previous tweaking I went through on the first monitor, though it may actually be due to the previous monitor being flawed of course. There is still a faint yellow tint to the top of the screen, which can be observed if actively looking for it, though it is noticeably less than the previous problem that was observed. Whilst I can see the difference, and could supply more photos of it, in practice it doesn’t seem an issue and is far better than living with a single dead pixel (the reason I had avoided the Acer Predator which seems to suffer from that?).Ultimately it’s still a good monitor albeit with a hefty price tag.One thing to note is that the Amazon returns policy, whilst very good in this case, has a potential problem as they suggested the Pass My Parcel service to return the monitor despite it being larger than the accepted max size for the PMP service – cue a home pickup ny the Hermes guy.