Review: ViewSonic's VP2768 Display Shines in the Digital Signage Arena

The new VP series from ViewSonic can handle a variety of tasks, with the robust features needed for specific use cases. With its flexible design and brilliant color display, this line of monitors is ideal for use as digital signage for industries ranging from retail to healthcare. The 27-inch VP2768 LED is a fitting example from the series.

Setting up the display took less than five minutes, with multiple DisplayPort and HDMI inputs available. The front of the LED is almost all viewable screen, with a tiny bezel around the edge. The monitor's hardware controls are hidden in the back. It's relatively easy to daisy-chain several VP2768 monitors together vertically or horizontally to create much larger, continuous-image displays suitable for digital signage or other applications that require a big screen.

The difference between the VP2768 and less robust monitors is obvious once the display is powered up — this is clearly a professional display available for a reasonable price. The LED supports up to 16.7 million colors, but only if an application demands it. Out of the box, the monitor is calibrated for accurate color matching well beyond what the human eye can discern. So, for example, if a photo is supposed to show vivid colors, they will look right on the display. But if it's supposed to be dull and lifeless, the monitor will replicate that as well.

Users can adjust the color calibration on the VP2768 for a variety of applications, such as photography, graphic design, content creation, digital media, electronic signage and other tasks. They all look great on the VP2768. The monitor comes with a factory calibration report for color accuracy, pretuned against the sRGB standard.

In addition to color accuracy, the VP2768 displays very little variation in luminance or other attributes across the screen, a rarity for a large monitor. A test of the bottom quadrant registered 99.81 percent brightness compared with the center of the display. Even the upper right corner, the weakest area, had 99.23 percent luminance, a difference the human eye can't see.

Despite its reasonable price, the VP2768 could easily compete with more expensive displays used for digital signage. It performs nearly flawlessly out of the box and offers many fine-tuning options. It would be an excellent choice for any digital signage scenario.

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Running the Color Gauntlet with the ViewSonic VP2768

The ViewSonic VP2768 LED monitor is designed for accuracy when displaying colors. But many professions, such as engineering and graphic design, require extremely tight tolerances, so users may wonder just how accurate the new VP series of monitors really is compared with hardware designed for specific purposes.

According to ViewSonic, the VP2768 achieves an average Delta E ≤ 2 score for most color testing. This is based on an extremely complex scale of color accuracy measurement used for a variety of applications, including electronic devices, printers and even fabrics. A score of Delta E ≤ 2 is impressive, basically meaning that the monitor can accurately display multiple distinct but very similar colors, even if the hues are so close that a human eye would perceive them as identical.

I ran a variety of tests on the VP2768 in which various color patterns were displayed on the screen, and used color-calibration hardware to test for accuracy. This included complex grids of diverse colors and hues designed around 255-step matrices.

The results were stunning: The VP2768 was extremely accurate for most colors, and particularly strong in displaying reds and greens (accuracy was less than Delta E = 1 for most of those tests). The monitor was most challenged displaying blue hues, where it reached Delta E = 3 on a few occasions, but never broke E = 4.

The display was also nearly flawless for grayscale color accuracy, a requirement for some industries, such as healthcare, and a tough area for most monitors to get right. Even with very fine gray grids on display, there were no artifacts and no moiré effects observed at any point during the trials.

In fact, the average score of all my tests of the VP2768 was Delta E = 0.85, which is better than the score ViewSonic touts. This is an exceedingly accurate monitor. What you see on the screen — and often what you can't see — is rendered nearly flawlessly.