NEC PA241W 24” Monitor Review

Posted by: admin on December 22, 2011 Under: Mid Range Monitors (£500 - £1000) |

The NEC PA241W is high quality monitor aimed at photographers and other colour professionals. The 24” p-IPS panel is capable of 10-bit colour and uses a 14-bit 3D LUT. The NEC PA241W has an extended colour gamut and after calibration has superb colour accuracy.

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The NEC PA241W has lots of handy features and comes with a good 3 year warranty. This monitor is not very well suited for gamers though, but is a great monitor for photography if you can afford the slightly hefty price tag.

24” p-IPS 10-bit panel

1920 x 1200 resolution

Wide colour gamut (98% Adobe RGB / 100% sRGB)

Extremely accurate colours (after calibration)

Screen uniformity function

Good connectivity

3 year warranty

The NEC PA241W is not the most exciting looking monitor in the world. It’s quite a meaty monitor at 8.5cm thick and weighing in at 10.6kg. This does make for a sturdy monitor and the size and weight shouldn’t bother you too much unless you need to move your monitor around regularly.


As you’d expect from a monitor aimed at photographers and colour professionals the NEC PA241W has a good range of adjustable features. The height is adjustable and the screen can be tilted through 35°. There are rotation and pivot options too and all are adjusted easily and smoothly.

The NEC PA241W monitor comes with a good range of ports situated at the rear, the only omission being an HDMI port but gamers and movie fans are more likely to miss this than photographers. The NEC PA241W has these connection options: 2x USB, 2x USB down, DisplayPort, 2x DVI (with HDCP) and D-sub.

As an IPS panel the NEC PA241W has superb viewing angles both horizontally and vertically. Hardly any colour shifting or change in contrast was detectable even at the widest angles.

The NEC PA241W actually has a p-IPS panel (the “p” means performance) which in essence is the same as an H-IPS panel but with enhanced colour depth. Helped by its W-CCFL backlighting the NEC PA241W is capable of 30-bit colour and can reproduce 1.07 billion colours. It’s worth noting you need compatible software, hardware and interfaces in order to take full advantage of 10-bit colour depth. If you have all the necessaries then such a vast colour depth is great for photographers as it reduces banding and improves colour gradation.

The NEC PA241W monitor caters for colour professionals and photographers who work with the extended colour spaces of Adobe RGB or NTSC which is covers 98% and 102% of respectively. There is also a mode for the more common sRGB colour space as well. This extended gamut helps the NEC PA241W to display vibrant and saturated colours.

The performance of the NEC PA241W out of the box is disappointing. Unlike some of the cheaper monitors we’ve reviewed, the NEC PA241W doesn’t come with a high level of factory calibration. This isn’t surprising though as NEC expect most buyers of this monitor to have access to a colorimeter and calibration software.

The NEC PA241W did show excellent gamma at the default setting hitting 2.2 on the nose. It also had good black depth and recorded a very respectable contrast ratio of 865:1 straight out of the box. The colour temperature was less impressive, deviating 17% from the ideal of 6500K.

The colour accuracy at default settings also produced lack-lustre results, recording an average Delta-E of 4.2 and a maximum of 11.2. This means most colours will be visibly different to the target colour and some will vary quite wildly. The NEC PA241W demands to be calibrated before you can use this monitor for photographic purposes.

Calibration really showed what this monitor can do. The colour temperature was improved to 6511K and the colour accuracy improved dramatically. After calibration the NEC PA241W recorded an average Delta-E of 0.2 with a maximum of 0.4, showing extremely accurate colours across the board.

The NEC PA241W also passed the DisplayMate 64-step greyscale test with flying colours, displaying every shade of grey.

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An extremely handy feature for photographers is included in the NEC PA241W. This monitor has a uniformity mode that counteracts variations in the screen’s luminance. With this function turned off, tests have shown the NEC PA241W to perform well in this regard but have detected deviations of up to 18% in some small areas of the screen. Turning the uniformity mode on, this variance was virtually wiped out with the NEC PA241W recording a maximum deviation of 3.5%.

The NEC PA241W even has functions to compensate for three types of colour blindness.

The NEC PA241W is not a great monitor for gamers as the poor grey-to-grey response time of 8ms allow for noticeable ghosting and blur when viewing fast moving images. The NEC PA241W also suffers from an uninspiring input lag.

The NEC PA241W is not much better as a monitor for movies either. A 16:9 aspect ratio is generally preferred for movies over the 16:10 of the NEC PA241W. The uniformity function and lack of backlight leakage in the NEC PA241W monitor does enhance the movie watching experience on this monitor though.

The NEC PA241W is a fantastic monitor for photographers but not a great all-rounder. It’s probably out of the price range of the amateur enthusiast but the NEC PA241W monitor will do any professional photographer or graphic designer proud. Highly recommended.

Pros

Superb performance with calibration

10-bit colour depth

Extended colour gamut

Large, high resolution screen

Uniformity mode

Cons

Bulky

Slow response times

Expensive

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