This review first appeared in issue 357 of PC Pro.
Sometimes, numbers can’t do justice to products. In fact, if you judged this monitor by numbers alone then it wouldn’t even win an award, let alone the Labs Winner gong. No matter how well it might perform in technical tests, there was one number that would always rule them all: the price. It’s more than three times as expensive as the award-winning Iiyama ProLite XUB3293UHSN-B5, despite them sharing the same 4K resolution and 31.5in screen diagonal, and scoring similarly in our tests.
We think the Iiyama is great – and stupendous value – but the Eizo will make you go “wow” in a way that no other monitor on test here can. Much of the credit for this must go to the combination of a 2,000:1 contrast ratio and the color characteristics of an IPS panel. Aside from mini-LED panels, we’ve never been hit so forcefully between the eyes when looking at photos or films. Couple that with gorgeous whites and it’s the best all-round image quality we’ve seen in a monitor this size.
Naturally, you also benefit from the extras offered by Eizo monitors. Let’s start with the OSD, as this is not only incredibly intuitive and speedy – Eizo provides the best OSDs here by some margin – but also offers the ability to tweak colors to fine margins. Head into the Advanced Settings, for instance, and you can control hue, saturation and gain.
However, you’ll probably find it easier to switch between the presets. Those are sRGB, Paper, Movie and DICOM (for medical environments), plus two user-defined slots. The sRGB preset is particularly impressive, locking the panel down to exactly 94% of the gamut, without any spillover, and with an excellent –albeit not exceptional in this month’s company – average Delta E of 0.61. Switch to Movie and it leaps from 66% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut to 87% – again, with no leakage and strong accuracy.
While you don’t get the high-end color control provided by Eizo’s ColorEdge monitors, nor its ColorNavigator software, Eizo’s InStyle software is worth the 6.6MB download. Connect over USB-C or USB-B and you can save your color preferences (useful if you connect to different Eizo screens in a hotdesking office) and activate the circadian dimming option – this gradually shifts the color temperature over the course of a day. The separate InStyle server tool offers some basic management for IT teams, too, so long as the monitor is connected via the wired network port. Useful if you want to prevent users pushing up the brightness too high or control how quickly its Power Save mode kicks in.
There are plenty of ways for users to control how much energy this monitor draws, too. Activate the EcoView mode in the OSD and it will change the brightness based on the ambient light conditions, and if you want to take manual control then it goes all the way from 1cd/m2up to 400cd/m2(despite its official peak of 350cd/m2).
As with the ColorEdge, you also benefit from a generous five-year warranty with the promise of on-site swapouts if something goes wrong. We also love how easy it is to set up Eizo monitors: they come ready assembled, so it’s simply a matter of lifting them into place.
Here, despite what looks like a pair of fixed feet, the stand delivers a huge amount of flexibility. You can rotate through 45° in either direction, tilt it up 35°, adjust the height by an astonishing 195mm and pivot it 90° into portrait mode (imagine having two of these monitors side by side). We love the sleek bezels, too, giving the monitor a more modern look than previous Eizo screens.
Eizo provides a generous number of ports, with a pair of HDMI inputs and a DisplayPort alongside USB-C. Two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports sit at the rear, too, with one more to the side next to a USB-C downstream port for connecting peripherals. This delivers up to 15W of power while the main USB-C connector can feed up to 94W.
There are even a pair of 3.5mm jacks, one for a mic and the second for headphones. You may never need this, though, as a pair of impressive 2W speakers round off the FlexScan’s features. While they don’t offer the miracle of a strong bass response, they’re a surprisingly good choice for listening to music. You may even decide you don’t need a separate pair of speakers.
Admittedly, that £50 saving only fills a small part of the nigh-on £1,500 you’ll need to pay for this monitor. Despite the many advantages offered by the FlexScan EV3240X over Iiyama’s far cheaper rival, that’s tough to justify. But trust us when we say that if you find the extra budget for this monitor, you’ll appreciate the purchase years after the pain of paying the bill has gone.
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