The computer monitor market is very competitive. ViewSonic has been making monitors for a long time, beginning with the CRT versions; they were some of the best monitors on the market. ViewSonic has recently introduced a series of high-quality monitors to compete in the demanding professional photographic market. Let’s find out how the new monitors perform!

The ViewSonic VP2768 (approximately $640) is a 27” monitor with a WQHD resolution of 2560 x 1440, backlit with an LED light bar, a 16:9 aspect ratio, and utilizes a hard-coated anti-glare (3H) SuperClear IPS panel colour active matrix TFT LCD screen. The video inputs include two HDMI 1.4 and two DisplayPort 1.2a (one mini and one regular) ports. There’s also one DisplayPort output for daisy-chaining monitors. The VP2768 has an excellent viewing angle of 178 degrees both horizontally and vertically. It can display 99 percent of the sRGB colour gamut, and it uses a 14-bit/3D look-up table (LUT) for very smooth and accurate colour. For those who want to tweak colour beyond normal calibration, the VP2768 allows for independent 6-axis colour (red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow) hue and saturation adjustments.

Each VP2768 contains a highly-detailed factory colour calibration and uniformity report in the box. Although you should still calibrate your monitor for your individual working environment, you can rest assured that your VP2768 is made with a tight manufacturing tolerance. To calibrate and profile the VP2768, the ideal solution is to use ViewSonic’s own Colorbration Kit CS-XRi1 (purchased separately), which is based on the X-Rite i1Profiler application with some features made specifically for ViewSonic monitors, but other solutions should also work.

ViewSonic calibration tool

For calibrating and profiling the VP2768, I’ve been using Colorbration, which has basic and advanced modes. In the basic mode, a wizard takes you through all the required steps, easily and quickly. Advanced mode provides you with many professional options to fine-tune the process to very specific requirements. During the calibration process, there’s an option for running uniformity correction. The uniformity correction is used to ensure that all areas of the monitor have consistent and accurate brightness and colour values.

The ViewSonic frameless design bezel is extremely thin — so thin that the buttons are on the back edge of the monitor. This bezel design will allow for a wonderful multi-monitor setup, as the gap between the screens will be very small. It will take a little time to become familiar with which button controls which setting, but once you’ve got your monitor calibrated and profiled, there’s really no reason to change them.