Viewsonic XG270QC Review – £500 VA 1440p 165Hz
Viewsonic’s attempt at a 1440p 165Hz Curved VA monitor is.. A little confusing, for one main reason. It’s price. It is listed for £500 or $450 in the USA. I’ve reviewed a whole lot of this type of monitor, TN, VA and IPS options, and that price tag just doesn’t make sense. Lets walk through it, test it out and see why, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
Let me start with the spec and features this offers. It’s a 27”, curved VA panel, with a 2560×1440 resolution and a max refresh rate of 165Hz. It offers Freesync Premium Pro – basically HDR with Freesync – and with a listed peak brightness of 550 nits it technically can. It’s also got motion blur reduction with one of the dumbest names ever. It’s called “PureXP”, as in when you turn it on you receive nothing but pure game XP for every match. I know, terrible. You can also select how fast you want the panel response time to be with quite a lot of different options.
So all of that sounds great, right? On paper, yeah! But as with everything, it’s not quite that simple. While at first glance it looks rather nice – it’s certainly bright enough for SDR usage – there are a few problems that all the fancy modes can’t seem to resolve. Let’s take a look at the panel’s response time. It’s actually pretty good, especially for a VA monitor, with the black to white time being around 6ms, and the white to black only being 1 or 2ms slower. That’s not bad at all, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate into no ghosting.
The UFO test reveals a shocking amount of ghosting, one of the worst I’ve seen for it actually, no matter what response time setting I had it on. On “Faster”, the second to quickest speed it left a significant trail, and honestly even on “Standard”, the slowest setting, I can’t say it made a difference. Even with the “PureXP” backlight strobing enabled on it’s fastest setting which again gave me a headache almost instantly when trying to game with it on, and significantly reduces the screens’ brightness, it still has a pretty significant trail behind the UFO – you can even see how slow the panel is as the backlight is off for a lot longer than it’s on in this mode and you can see the UFOs almost burned into the panel even when it’s off.
All of this culminates in a gaming experience that while still playable, for the first time in my monitor testing career, I finally noticed ghosting while playing. It was relatively distracting, and while I still put in a reasonable performance in CSGO (and by that I mean terrible, as always), I found it harder to land shots compared to some of the other monitors in the same class.
If you are worried about input lag, it’s not so bad. My TimeSleuth reported it as 2.8ms at the top of the display which is a reasonable result, although not mind blowing. Total system input lag, so from a mouse click to gun firing in game, was around 30ms which is pretty average.
As for colours, the panel does a good job here. My SpyderX reported as displaying over 100% of the sRGB spectrum, and around 91% of the DCI P3 spectrum making it a reasonable choice for gamers who want to edit on the side.
Viewing angles are decent too, without much distortion in any direction. Even if you did have a bad angle, you’ve got plenty of tilt, height and some swivel built into the fairly sleek stand. The swivel is a little strange, much like the Aorus FI27Q-P it has it built into the monitor attachment point rather than the base of the stand, although there isn’t much give in this so it’s pretty sturdy and wobble free. I/O wise, you get 2 HDMI inputs, 1 displayport, and a USB 3 hub, all hidden nicely by a fairly easy to remove cover.
The problem I have with all of this is that for almost half the price, you can buy an AOC CQ27G2U, which has almost identical colour results – seriously look at the graph, they are almost an exact match – it’s got an almost identical response time, identical amounts of ghosting, and a similar input lag result too, all for a lot, lot less money. In fact, for £150-200 less you can buy the Acer VG271UP, the IPS 1440p 144Hz monitor I reviewed a little while ago that performs much better than this in literally every aspect and again for so much less money.
If this was listed for £300, maybe even £350, it might make sense. But for £500, I’m sorry but it just doesn’t. I’m struggling to see why you’d buy one of these over the countless other options available now for either a lot less money or similar, but get a much better monitor.
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TechteamGB Score
