Nixeus monitors have always come with On Screen Display that we consider decent. Sure, they may lack advanced features such as 6-axis adjustment color adjustment, but the combination of physical buttons with a consistent and fairly well thought out OSD means you can easily ‘get the job done’ without too much hassle. As such, some may feel that even an inexpensive colorimeter is not worth the cost.
It behooves us to say that before you write off a colorimeter – even if you only plan on using it once – the EDG27X is not factory calibrated. This means that every single one may, or even will, come with a different color profile ‘out of the box’. This is very common with non-professional monitors… and why we invested in a i1Display Pro many moons ago. Bluntly stated, a colorimeter will give you not only a more accurate but more consistent color profile than what most non-professionals can do manually.
Furthermore, from a reviewer’s point of view, this does limit how much help we can be in setting up your EDG27X. We can only go by our sample and yours may have a radically different ‘out of the box’ profile. So please take the following as an example of the process you will have to do and not the precise settings you will need to do.
With this in mind, the first thing we did was lower the luminance output so that it was nowhere near as bright. For our environment that meant lowering backlight down to the low 30s. This resulted in about 150’ish nits of output. Your environment may be brighter than ours and the default settings may be ‘good enough’… or maybe it will be darker and you need to go down to 120nits and the mid 20s. Your mileage may vary.
With the brightness taken care of the next thing we would do is lower all three colors by 7 in the OSD. Of course, to do that you will have to change the mode first. We then raised red up by 1, blue by 3, and green by 5. This gave a confirmed 100/99/100 R/G/B color rating via our colorimeter. This is not perfect but with only twenty minutes of work it would be ‘good enough’ for most people’s needs. In all likelihood we would have had to double to triple the ratios to dial in a 100/100/100. Which would have extended the time required by a factor of three – at the least.
Lastly, we would then set the Over Drive to about 40-44 and call it a day as that will get you a much better color profile that will also provide a decent place to start on artifact reduction settings.
