Picture Quality

The EIZO FlexScan EV3240X features a 31.5-inch, 8-bit IPS panel capable of displaying 16.7 million colors. It's also equipped with a 14-bit LUT, which can represent 16,384 distinct values per color channel, giving it the ability to handle more subtle color and tonal gradations (less banding).

The panel is illuminated by a capable LED backlight system. The backlight unit is controlled by direct current (DC), which makes it flicker-free at any given brightness level.

The screen coating on the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X is light anti-glare (AG). The screen is quite 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 cd/m², accompanied by a static contrast ratio of 2,000:1 – twice as much compared to what we usually get from IPS panels.

The native screen resolution is 4K (3840x2160), which when stretched over 31.5 inches results in a pixel density of 140 PPI. Text and UI elements, when displayed on the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X, look exceptionally crisp. It was a treat to use Windows and Office apps on this monitor, excluding those that don't handle UI scaling correctly. Some level of scaling must be used, because everything looks too tiny on 100%. Windows recommends 150% scaling, which gives you the same amount of screen real estate you'd get from a 32-inch 1440p monitor at 100% scaling. However, you can get away with a modest 125% scaling to get more room, which is what I used while working on the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X with no visibility issues at all.

To test the picture quality of the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X, I've used a combination of the X-Rite i1Display Pro, DisplayCAL – a powerful software solution for display calibration and profiling, which is completely free to use, assuming you own a supported colorimeter – and Calman, the industry-standard display testing and calibrating software suite.

Picture Quality at Factory Settings

The picture quality of the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X at its factory defaults was tested after allowing it to warm up for about an hour. To get consistent results, I turned off both the "Auto EcoView" and "EcoView Optimizer 2" features, so that the panel brightness and color temperature wouldn't change depending on the amount of ambient light.


If by this point you still weren't sure why the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X costs significantly more than an ordinary monitor of the same size and native resolution, these measurements should provide you with the best possible explanation. As you can see, the panel has been expertly factory-tuned, and it measures much, much better than most consumer monitors that pass through my hands. EIZO wants you to be able to take their monitor out of the box, connect it to a source, and start using it, knowing that you're getting the best out of it without having to fiddle with settings or calibrating. The gamma curve looks great, as does the average grayscale ∆E and color accuracy, and even static contrast ratio, which does indeed reach (and even surpass) the specified 2,000:1 mark. The sRGB gamut coverage is 100% (the actual sRGB gamut volume is 119%). The monitor also offers 87.8% DCI-P3 gamut coverage (88.6% DCI-P3 gamut volume) and 75.5% Adobe RGB gamut coverage (86.1% volume). EIZO obviously (and openly) focused on the sRGB color space, which makes perfect sense, given the planned areas of application for the FlexScan EV3240X, which are offices of all sizes, CAD, finance, control rooms, and video surveillance.

The only detail that requires some attention is the measured red color channel imbalance, which I tried to fix in the OSD by playing with the color channel gains while constantly monitoring their balance and color temperature. To get the best results, I had to go to the Color > Advanced Settings > Gain menu, and set the Red channel to 96, Green to 98, and Blue to 97. The only other change I made was changing the brightness to 88 (Color > Brightness menu), in order to get it closer to my preferred 250 cd/m² level, which I find ideal for combined day and nighttime usage.

Let's compare the measurements before and after doing the OSD tweaks.



We see substantial improvements in grayscale accuracy and color temperature, which is to be expected considering we fixed the red channel imbalance, but overall, the image quality remained excellent, simply because there wasn't much to fix.


This is what the luminance and color uniformity of the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X look like when measured at 25 different patches across the panel. Please click on the image to see it in high resolution and examine the data in greater detail. The upper edge of the panel shows some imperfections, particularly in terms of color uniformity, as the average ∆E goes up to 5.18, meaning there will be a noticeable shift in color accuracy compared to the rest of the panel. While this won't bother you at all in everyday work, it could pose a problem for color-critical tasks, such as photo and video editing. Both the luminance and contrast deviation are very small across the panel, even in places where color accuracy takes a hit.

Picture Quality After Calibration

I calibrated the display by using the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter and the DisplayCAL software solution. The initial profiling and calibration were done with the luminance target set to 250 cd/m², which presents a happy medium for a comfortable combined day and nighttime usage.

Here's what we get after calibrating the monitor.



After calibrating the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X for the sRGB color space, the built-in 32-inch IPS panel gets as good as it can possibly be. Every parameter related to the picture quality is exactly where we want it to be, and the color accuracy is impressive, with the ∆E being 0.29, and never surpassing 0.86.

Backlight Uniformity

To give you an idea of the backlight's uniformity, I set the brightness of the monitor to 250 cd/m² before taking a photo of the panel in a completely dark room. I did my best to find a combination of the ISO value and shutter speed that would capture the screen in a way that has it look as close to what my eyes were seeing in real life.



The photo shows that there's quite some backlight bleed present in the top corners of the panel. I didn't find it distracting or was even able to spot them while using the monitor.

Viewing Angles

The viewing angles of the IPS panel built into the EIZO FlexScan EV3240X are excellent. There's no visible shift in colors when changing sitting positions.