NEC EA294WMi Review
by Chris Heinonen on February 10, 2014 6:00 AM ESTWhere all the 21:9 displays have excelled is with their uniformity. Talking to NEC about this, the shorter vertical height is one of the main reasons for this. Every display has a certain tolerance for panel shifting or twisting when it is produced. By having a shorter height this tolerance level is reduced and it is easier to produce a panel that is more rigid from top to bottom. This leads to more uniform backlighting overall and these better uniformity results.
Looking at the NEC, the white uniformity is good but not great. There is a decent bit of light fall-off at the edges, past the 10% level that I would consider to be good. Additionally the top of the display is a bit bright relative to the center of the display. This is a bit worse than I have come to expect for the 21:9 displays.
Black uniformity exhibits similar issues. The bottom of the screen, especially the corners, is too bright and the sides are darker. The deviation is just far too high for the black levels and it leads to a screen where you can easily see bright areas with a dark background.
Because of this the contrast uniformity varies across the screen. Some areas see contrast ratios of over 1,100:1 while other areas are closer to 500:1 or below. Usually with screens we see more contrast uniformity as if there are bright corners, the whites are brighter as well, but with the NEC we see an overall lack of uniformity here.
The color uniformity has issues as well. The right side of the screen, where the backlight is low, has larger dE2000 errors for color than the rest of the display. Most of the screen has a color dE2000 below 2.0 when compared to the center but there are certain areas that are above that.
The uniformity of the panel here is disappointing. It is almost certainly due to a non-uniform backlight that is then causing errors in the expected brightness of colors. Since the 21:9 panels usually excel at this, I wonder if this sample is on the poor side or if I’ve just gotten lucky with the previous samples. Either way, the uniformity here on the NEC is not as good as I would like it to be.
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DanNeely - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
I seem to've missed the 21:9 1440p CES reports; and the only thing I'm finding Googling now is some pre-CES rumors about a 34" Dell monitor. Who else is playing in the 1440p crazy wide segment?REALfreaky - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/tag/219DanNeely - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
There's no CES 2014 coverage in that link at all and all the reviews are for the existing 2560x1080 panel.marcosears - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
NEC sure is trying, but just can't meet the standards of some of the great monitors that have come out. /Marco from http://www.consumertop.com/best-monitor-guide/Olaf van der Spek - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
> DVI SLWhat's the use of DVI SL on this display? It can't drive 2560 x 1080 can it?
> CES this year saw the introduction of 21:9 displays with 1440 lines of vertical resolution as opposed to 1080, making it a more direct replacement for 27” displays.
3360 x 1440? That's nice!
JarredWalton - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
You can use single-link to drive standard 1080p resolutions (1920x1080), so it's just another input. VGA and HDMI can't handle 2560x1080 either AFAIK (unless it's HDMI 1.4 maybe?) but people still have old devices around that use those.DanNeely - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
HDMI 1.4 offers it; but AFAIK monitor support has been a problem because only offering 1.3 on the monitor allows them to use same hardware as DVI instead of having to use a decoder that's clocked 2x as fast.nathanddrews - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
VGA delivers 2560x1600@75Hz on my FW900.Death666Angel - Monday, February 10, 2014 - link
And unless you have something like a Matrox, I bet the picture looks awful. No recent AMD/nVidia card I know of has decent VGA output. And 75Hz is really on the low side for a CRT for me. Below 80 gave me headaches and eye strain in some situations.nathanddrews - Thursday, February 13, 2014 - link
The PQ is excellent for gaming, however that resolution is slightly less crisp for text near the edges of the screen. I usually just run 1920x1200 since it is uniformly crisp and offers a 96Hz refresh rate, which is great for twitch games and perfect for viewing film content.