Picture Quality

The EIZO FlexScan EV2785 features an 8-bit IPS panel capable of displaying 16.7 million colors. The screen uses a White-LED (W-LED) backlight unit. It's controlled by a hybrid system that combines direct current (DC) and pulse-width modulation (PWM). Why didn't EIZO go with a "pure" DC system? Because of the Auto EcoView brightness sensor, which requires the aforementioned hybrid system to work properly. When the brightness is set to anywhere from 49% to 100%, the backlight is controlled by DC. From 0% to 48%, a high-frequency (10 kHz), low amplitude PWM is used to control it. I didn't spot any flickering at any brightness level. In practice, you'll most likely never have the brightness set below 49% anyway as that would make the picture too dark for any kind of use. That means you won't ever enter the "PWM zone" of this hybrid backlight control system.

The screen coating on the EIZO FlexScan EV2785 is light anti-glare (AG). The screen is very resistant to reflecting its surroundings even when used in a room with a lot of natural or artificial light, and the picture isn't perceived as grainy or dirty from a normal sitting distance, which can be the case with heavier AG coatings. The maximum specified brightness of the panel is 350 nits, accompanied by a static contrast ratio of 1,300:1. Let's fire up the Datacolor Spyder5ELITE+, an excellent colorimeter I use to test and calibrate all of my screens to find out what the EIZO FlexScan EV2785 has to offer in terms of picture quality.

Picture Quality at Factory Settings

The picture quality of the EIZO FlexScan EV2785 set to its factory defaults was tested right after plugging it in and allowing it to warm up for about an hour. At its factory settings, "User1" color mode (picture profile) is active. The Auto EcoView option is turned on, so the exact level of actual brightness will depend on the amount of ambient lighting in your work environment. In my office, which is usually dimly lit, the EcoView sensor automatically brought the brightness all the way down to 20 nits. As I didn't find that usable, I deactivated both Auto EcoView and EcoView Optimizer 2. After doing so, the monitor has the brightness set to 85% (206 nits of actual brightness), contrast to 50%, color temperature to 6500K, gamma to 2.2, hue and saturation to 0 (middle value), and gain to 100 (Red), 96 (Green) and 93 (Blue). The latter would imply that every single sample of this monitor gets checked and fine-tuned before leaving the factory. The Super Resolution feature is turned off, and Overdrive is set to Standard.

After doing absolutely nothing except turning EcoView off, it immediately became very obvious that the FlexScan EV2785 has a lot going for it. The factory picture quality is excellent. The colors are deep and rich, gradients look natural and smooth, and sharpness at the native 4K resolution is simply staggering. I checked the backlight uniformity and was unable to find a single region of the panel that showed signs of backlight bleed. It will be interesting to see what the colorimeter will tell us in terms of backlight uniformity. To the naked eye, the picture on the factory settings looks pretty much flawless.

The first measurement I took showed that the actual brightness at factory settings is sitting at a comfortable level of 208.79 nits, with the color temperature being 6,529 K. In other words, unless you prefer a really bright picture, nothing needs to be adjusted at all. If you like your picture bright, you can simply increase the brightness setting to 89. That will increase the actual brightness to around 250 nits. Of course, you can also go all out and set it to 100, which will result in 371 nits of brightness. It should be said that the color temperature constantly stays at around 6,500 K, and general color performance remains excellent.

As many of you surely know, especially those who tried it, 4K workflow in Windows has historically been bogged down by display scaling issues. In Windows 10, the recommended scaled value for a 27-inch 4K screen is 150%. If you keep the size of the Windows interface (icons, text, apps and other items) at 100%, every element of the UI will be too small to be usable. As a minimum, the scale level should be set to 125%, but I generally agree with Microsoft's guidelines—150% results in the best overall user experience. The issues that were present in earlier versions of Windows 10 were caused by the fact that certain menus and parts of the interface, such as—tragicomically—Microsoft's own Computer Management menu, didn't scale properly. That left them looking blurry and broken. I'm happy to report that's no longer the case. I didn't run into a single blurry menu or poorly rendered item while having the scale level set to 150% on Windows 10 Pro version 1709 (the so-called Fall Creators Update, OS build 16299.309). Adobe also fixed scaling issues in their entire suite of professional editing tools, which was one of the main reasons why professionals that work in Windows were somewhat reluctant to pick up a 4K monitor.

One thing you should be aware of, though, is that scaling of the interface actually reduces the screen's available real estate. A scaling level of 150% at 4K resolution results in exactly the same amount of real estate on screen as with a 1440p display set to 100% scaling (its recommended default value). However, thanks to higher pixel density (the screen quite literally contains more pixels), a 4K panel will still be noticeably sharper, regardless of the scale level. If you're after more screen real estate than you can get from a 1440p monitor, you should set the scale level to 125%.


As we can see by looking at the CIE diagram, we get a 99% coverage of the sRGB and 80% coverage of the Adobe RBG color space out of the box, which is completely in line with what we'd expect from a standard-gamut IPS monitor.


The measured display gamma was 2.3, with the target being set to 2.2. However, the graph only shows a tiny bit of deviation from the ideal value, which is fantastic as gamma-related issues are not easy to fix without a proper calibration.


I also did a measurement of the gamma after setting the target to 1.8, which is the second most popular value among users. The quantified measured value again had an offset of 0.1, sitting at 1.9, but the graph again shows very little deviation from the set value. Excellent! As already stated earlier in the review, you're free to set the gamma to any value from 1.8–2.4. The 0.1 offset of the measured gamma value, compared to the selected one, remains the same across the board.

These are the measured brightness and contrast values for various brightness settings:


The table confirms what I mentioned earlier—the actual brightness of the FlexScan EV2785 is very low at all the way up to 70% brightness in the OSD. This is what causes the anomaly with the contrast measurements. At 0%, 25%, and 50%, the picture is so dark that the colorimeter interprets the black point as 0.00, which is why the calculated contrast level is exceptionally high. In order to get a more realistic idea of the screen's actual contrast, we need to look at the final two measurements (75% and 100% brightness). Here, the static contrast sits in the 800-900:1 range, which is more than what you'd expect from a business monitor, although not really that close to the declared value of 1,300:1.


Checking the color uniformity is where we get a taste of EIZO's excellent quality control. The FlexScan EV2785 keeps the Delta-E deviation under 2.5 across the entire panel except for on the bottom-right part of the screen, where it goes to 3.2 at 100% brightness.


Luminance is excellent. Any oscillations that don't venture above 11% are next to impossible to spot with the naked eye. In other words, even though the colorimeter shows us that the upper part of the screen is up to 11% darker than its middle, that's not something you'll be able to perceive while using the monitor. I rarely see this kind of uniformity on monitors that pass through my hands.


Need more proof of the excellent out-of-the-box color accuracy? Take a look at these measurements made in DisplayCal by using the ArgyII CMS. With the average Delta-E being as low as 1.06 and the maximum not going over 2.3, color precision of the EIZO FlexScan EV2785 is superb. Once again, this test was conducted without calibrating the monitor, by simply using the User1 factory profile.

Let's analyze what happens when we switch between the factory color profiles. These measurements have been made without any kind of additional adjustments to these profiles.

Picture Quality After Calibration

I calibrated the display by using Datacolor's recommended settings. They suggest you set the gamma to 2.2, color temperature to 6,500 K, and brightness to 120 nits. The Spyder5ELITE+ does allow you to do the calibration with more brightness (up to 180 nits) or a value you enter manually should you find that to be too dark. Here are the OSD settings I had to use to achieve those values:


Let's take a look at the post-calibration report:


Not much was achieved by calibrating the monitor, nor was that to be expected. EIZO's factory calibration is so good you simply can't do much better. The colors did get a tad more punchy and natural in certain ways (human skin tones, for example), but it was by no means a significant change.

Here's the ICC profile (download) that was made by calibrating the monitor with the recommended settings listed in the table above. This calibration was done with the brightness target set to 120 nits.

The second ICC profile (download) was created after manually setting the desired brightness and related calibration settings to 250 nits. Setting the brightness so high can be uncomfortable to the eyes, but many users prefer using a very bright display.

Backlight Uniformity

To give you an idea of the backlight's uniformity, brightness was set to 120 and 250 nits before I took photos in a completely dark room. I did my best to find an ISO value and shutter speed that would best capture the screen in a way that has it look as close to what my eyes were seeing in real life.



At 250 nits, we can see that the three corners of the screen are ever so slightly brighter than the rest of it. I was unable to spot this in everyday usage, which is why I'm unable to interpret it as a real issue. At 120 nits, it's even less visible, even in a completely dark, windowless room with the monitor displaying a pitch black photograph.

Viewing Angles

This being an IPS-type panel, the viewing angles are great. There's no visible shift in colors when you change your sitting position. You'll have a lot of freedom to move your head any way you like.


Here's a photo of a completely black screen taken at a wide angle. Don't confuse what you see with backlight bleed since it's IPS glow, an inherent feature of the technology. It looks nasty, but isn't an issue at all because you won't see it at a normal sitting distance if your eyes are roughly level with the center of the screen. Should you find yourself noticing it in everyday usage, you're simply sitting too close to the monitor.