+ Great clarity for IPS, this truly feels like a TN panel in terms of responsiveness and motion clarity. Theoretically, If the Omen 25X was rated 10/10 on motion clarity, I'd give the Viewsonic a solid 9/10 and this is without touching PureXP. Seriously impressed here, this is easily much better than the first gen TN 240hz panels I use to have.
+ The overdrive is done well, the stock OD1/2 are too blurry for my liking, but 3 looks great to me, even at lower fps. OD3 on the Viewsonic is right on the heels of OD2 on the Omen in terms of clarity. It's seriously very good for IPS.
+ Colors are good, but not the greatest I've seen on an IPS. I honestly expected a bit more from past IPS experiences, but still easily an improvement in colors over the Omen. With HDR enabled, you get the WOW factor and pop. Without HDR I'd say there isn't much WOW factor here.
+/- DCR is nice, but even on the lowest settings, sometimes it's way too bright on white content and the transitions can be very distracting between very dark and very light scenes.
- Viewing angles aren't that great, unless you're sitting down. If you get up and move slightly to the sides of the display, the entire screen is coated it white glow/haze. I don't remember my past IPS doing this until you reached more extreme angles.
- Sadly, my unit has some pretty bad IPS glow. On the right corner, it extends up from the the corner to past the damn middle of the screen! I've never seen glow this bad before. When I'm sitting straight up, the background wallpaper on the blur buster forum of the checkered flag has a hazed grey look to it right in the middle of the screen! When I recline in my chair, the haze complete fades and the colors turn a few shades darker. It seriously feels like the same limitation of TNs with gamma shift, but far more noticeable than the gamma shift on my TN. These are a cropped photos to show the affected area of the screen and what I described above -
https://i.imgur.com/3KsoHKr.png - You can see how far up this affects the color, it's absurd. That crop is of a full screen, minus taskbar and browser tabs/address bar.
- Eye strain/fatigue. This started pretty rapidly after only 30 mins of use. It didn't grow much over time or develop into a headache, but my eyes still have a heavy feel to them.
- Disabling the Power LED doesn't always work. If you alt-tab out of games, the power LED flickers on/off. When you put the PC to sleep, the LED turns back on. Have companies still learned nothing about these annoying super bright blue LED power indicators that blind you at night from across the room?
- Some BLB top left and top right
- Why is the sharpness slider in increments of 25? It makes it a completely useless menu option, I thought I could do a tiny bump from 50 to 55-60 to give edges a slight pop, but it jumps to 75 and clearly way over sharpened on this.
- Still see gradient banding in some content similar to my TN. Good example, the default W11 wallpapers.
- OSD is awful. If you spend a lot of time in menus tweaking, this thing is going to waste a ton of your time. Confusing layout, bad buttons, zero customization of buttons, 4 buttons that all call up the same last menu?
- Very slow wake. Takes like 8 seconds to hit desktop from cold power on. Omen is like 2-3 seconds. ViewSonic does wake fast from sleep in around 3s, but Omen is still faster in this scenario.
With all that said, the panel is still very nice. Most of my negative points are little nitpicking things majority can easily overlook. If the panel didn't have the uniformity issues with GLOW/BLB being so severe, I would have finally ditched my TN. I expected a bit of BLB and Glow. The small amount of BLB I could live with, but the glow extending up nearly the entire vertical space is definitely a deal breaker for me. I'm unsure if I want to bother with an exchange and play the lottery, but I will definitely not be keeping it unless it improves. I have read some posts from Chief saying to leave the monitor on some days at max brightness, as it can improve GLOW, so I'll be giving it a shot.
Edit: Day 2
- Still significant glow after leaving it on 100% brightness overnight. I tried some bias lighting, pushing monitor further back, but it still annoys me.
- Developed eye strain again after some short usage.
+ Today I was messing around with the "Black Stabilization". I saw it earlier, but I thought it was just the traditional black equalizer that just makes everything super grey/washed out, but also reveals details in dark environments better. I tested it today, and it's not like the traditional black equalizer! It actually has a digital vibrance type of color boost, while also revealing details in dark environments much better! It's like digital vibrance mixed with black equalizer in 1 setting. And the colors actually look really good (ofc not accurate, but for vibrance boosted and black eq boosted, looks amazing), even at some of the higher values for gaming and making enemies stand out better. Extremely nice feature. This should really be the standard going forward, it's that good.