BenQ GW2750HM review

BenQ is one of the current champions of VA panel technology, and the GW2750HM is one of the latest budget 27in monitors from its home and office range. It’s quite a bit cheaper than any other 27in monitor we’ve tested, but this shows in its overall build quality. Aside from its glossy plastic bezel, we had concerns over its comparatively small fixed plastic stand. The monitor itself is quite hefty, and the stand would rock quite precariously unless we held it firmly in place while tilting the screen.

The most disappointing part of the GW2750HM, though, was its overall image quality at the screen’s default settings. Our solid colour test files looked anaemic, with blacks appearing positively grey even with the brightness at its lowest setting. As a VA panel, low black levels should be one its greatest strengths, and we recorded a black level of 0.10cd/m² with our colour calibrator. The only way to see this in action, though, is to alter the RGB PC Range in the Advanced Picture settings to RGB (16-235) instead of its default RGB (0-255). This greatly improved our black images and delivered a much deeper tone than before.

Sadly, this improvement didn’t carry over to many of our other solid colour tests. Whites appeared a pinkish grey while reds, greens and blues all lacked depth and vibrancy. Our high contrast photos were also marred by colours looking very drab, in spite of our high measured contrast ratio of 3940:1, which helped produce a high level of detail in each image.

The screen’s colour accuracy wasn’t much better, as our colour calibrator showed it was only displaying 82.8% of the sRGB colour gamut at its default settings. This is one of the lowest colour accuracy scores we’ve seen, even from a VA panel, and we only managed to increase this figure to 84.7% after calibration. In both instances, our calibration graphs showed the screen falling well short of displaying the amount of the red colour spectrum required by the sRGB gamut, and it also skimmed over some lighter greens and blues.

The colour gamut didn’t impress us, and didn’t improve much after calibration

The monitor redeemed itself somewhat with its wide viewing angles. We had to be practically side on before we saw any great change in contrast horizontally, but its vertical viewing angles certainly didn’t get anywhere near BenQ’s claimed 178 degrees.

For inputs, the monitor has VGA, DVI and HDMI inputs as well as a 3.5mm audio line in and a headphone jack. There are also two 2W speakers embedded in the back of the monitor, and these were surprisingly good for monitor speakers. There was a good level of bass and while they still sounded a little tinny, we’d be happy to listen to music without plugging in dedicated speakers.

Ultimately, these are only small points in the GW2750HM’s favour, and there are much better VA panels available at a similar price such as the award-winning 24in BenQ BL2410PT. If you’re definitely after a 27in screen you’d be much better off saving up for the Iiyama Prolite E2773HS, which has vastly superior image quality.