BenQ GW2760HS review

The BenQ GW2760HS is a 27in monitor with a VA display and a 1,920×1,080 resolution. Its slim glossy bezel makes it look smart and stylish and its fixed, compact stand prevents it from taking up too much room on your desk.

It’s an updated version of BenQ’s GW2760HM monitor as it now comes with BenQ’s new flicker-free LED backlight. You might think all monitors are flicker-free, but several displays control the strength of their backlight by flicking the LED backlight on and off again at very high speeds to maintain its brightness. This happens so quickly your eyes don’t register it, but it can cause eye fatigue if you use your monitor at anything less than 100% brightness.

The GW2760HS, on the other hand, maintains a constant brightness by using a direct current that negates the need to turn the LED backlight on and off again, making it much healthier for your eyes if you’re looking at it for a long period of time. A simple way to test this is to hold up your phone’s camera to the monitor. Non-flicker-free monitors will show a perceptible banding across the screen, but this wasn’t the case with the GW2760HS.

Of course, simply being healthier for your eyes isn’t enough to make it a good monitor, but luckily the GW2760HS has one of the best 27in VA panels we’ve seen. Its default brightness settings were a little too intense for us at 320.9cd/m², so we lowered the brightness to 50% for testing, but we were pleasantly surprised when our colour calibrator showed it was displaying 91.9% of the sRGB colour gamut on its default settings. This is much higher than any other VA panel we’ve tested at this size and it was only marginally short in its red and green coverage. We weren’t able to increase this figure after calibration, unfortunately, but it didn’t make too much of a difference in our subjective image tests.

Solid whites were a little grey and reds weren’t quite as vibrant compared to our reference monitor, but blues and greens just as rich and its impressive blacks were deep and true. This reflected our excellent black level reading of just 0.09cd/m², which is the lowest black level we’ve ever recorded.

This had a slightly negative impact on our high contrast test images, though. Despite recording a contrast ratio of 3,418:1 before calibration, which is actually a bit higher than BenQ’s claimed ratio of 3,000:1, its deep black levels often made particularly dark areas of our photos appear as a mass of black compared to our more highly detailed reference monitor. This is a shame, but the effect is less of a problem on lighter, brighter images. Here, the shadow detail actually stands out much more than our reference monitor, leading to a more pleasing image overall.

The GW2760HS has a good range of inputs, but nothing out of the ordinary. You’ll find VGA, DVI and HDMI inputs round the back, as well as a 3.5mm audio line in and a headphone jack. This is particularly handy if your PC isn’t within easy reach, but we’d recommend some standalone speakers, as the monitor’s integrated pair of 1W speakers are only really suitable for Windows sounds and the odd YouTube clip.

The BenQ GW2760HS is an excellent VA panel. It doesn’t quite compete with more accurate IPS displays, but at this price it seems churlish to complain. If you particularly suffer from monitor-related eye strain, the GW2760HS is for you.