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Iiyama’s Prolite XB2779QS has to be one of the company’s best looking monitors yet. Its curved chassis hides the monitor’s overall screen thickness well. At its thinnest point the XB2779QS is just 9mm thick, which makes it one of the slimmest displays we’ve tested in recent months. Its huge 2,560×1,440 resolution also looks razor sharp on the XB2779QS’s 27in IPS display and its edge-to-edge glass looks smart against its glossy black bezel and matt metallic finish. It’s height adjustable too, and has a generous amount of screen tilt to help you find a comfortable working angle.
You’ll need to use a dual-link DVI-D cable to take advantage of the XB2779QS’s high resolution, but it also has VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort inputs.
Image quality was superb. Our colour calibrator showed it was already displaying 99.7 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut at its default settings, with only a very slight weakness in its red coverage. This is fantastic for an IPS display, but we were able to increase it to a near-perfect 99.9 per cent after calibration. We had to sacrifice a sliver of its blue coverage in order to extend its red accuracy, but it had little effect on our subjective image tests.
Reds, greens and blues were all rich and vibrant, and the screen’s glossy finish really helped colours to stand out. They were much brighter and vivid than our reference screen, which has a matt finish, and there was no hint of grey to be found in our solid whites. Blacks were deep, too, which reflected our low black level reading of 0.30cd/m², but it did reveal very small areas of backlight bleeding in the bottom left corner and top right of the screen. This is a shame, but you’d be hard pushed to notice it on a daily basis unless you were regularly using it to watch films.
We saw a very high level of detail in all our high contrast test photos. It was consistently a few shades darker than our reference monitor, particularly in areas of fine shadow detail, but we thought the monitor’s more intense colours produced a more pleasing image overall.
The XB2779QS’s touch-control menu buttons are very easy to use. As well as a customisable User mode, there are three standard picture modes (Warm, Normal and Cool) to choose from and five special “i-Style” modes. These include a second Standard profile along with Scenery, Cinema, Game and Text profiles. We preferred to leave it on our custom colour profile, as Game and Cinema were a little too bright and harsh for our liking, while Text significantly lowered the brightness.
The Iiyama Prolite XB2779QS is expensive for a 27in monitor, but it’s still significantly cheaper than the Ultimate award-winning Dell U2713H (around £100 at the time of writing), which has the same size resolution. It doesn’t have quite as many connections as the Dell, nor does it rotate into portrait mode, but both monitors have superb image quality. If you’re looking for a high resolution display, and don’t need the extra features of the Dell, then the Prolite XB2779QS is the one to buy.
