28. Display Quality Assessment: Static Images

The display Acer 5672WLMi's display shows very homogeneous brightness distribution, with an average around 120 cd/m2. At 96:1, its black-white contrast is very low, because black values on our test machine measured a very high 1 cd/m2.

The matt surface of the Alienware Aurora M7700 screen is somewhat brighter, with a mean brightness of 133 cd/m2. The brightness on this notebook climbs by several candela from the lower edge of the display up to the middle, then declines again as you approach its upper edge. At 368:1, black-white contrast is a very good value for a non-glossy display. The peak contrast measurement on the lower edge of the display is a result of a nearly total black measurement area (0.20cd/m2) as compared to the neighboring measurement fields (0.45 and 0.46 cd/m2).

The Asus A7J and the Compaq nx9420 include highly glossy displays. As opposed to the Aspire 5672WLMi, the two aforementioned units show black values between 0.2 and 0.4 cd/m2. When combined with the average high brightness levels for both computers, we also measured very good white-to-black contrast ratios. For the Asus A7J we obtained an average brightness of 153cm/m2 with an average white-to-black contrast ratio of 501:1. This value was exceeded only by our reading from the Compaq nx9420. For this display, we calculated a value of 617:1 for white-to-black contrast. Nevertheless, the HP display isn't terribly bright (an average value of 106.2 cd/m2) and brightness also falls off substantially on its left edge. The A7J display dips in brightness at the middle of the upper edge instead.

Subjectively, the Alienware display looked the best to us. The Asus A7J might be better for image editing or viewing videos, on the other hand, because the colors on its BrightView monitor appeared noticeably more saturated than on a matte-finish display surface. The monitor on the HP Compaq nx9240 didn't excite us much because of its relatively low maximum brightness, nor did the Acer 5672WLMi's milky blacks work us up too much. Aside from these limitations, both of these notebooks also delivered reasonably saturated colors.