Contrast, black point and coating - Eizo FlexScan S2031W

Brightness and black point

Brightness control allows for excellent range of 50-340 cd/m². This well-chosen range has many benefits.

Movies are best watched in a pitch black room at about 60 cd/m², so the ability to decrease the backlight intensity here has a great benefit for comfortable watching. This will also be valued by people who work under low-illumination conditions, for example at night with a single 60 W light bulb.

At lowest brightness setting, the black point is only 0.06 cd/m², which is quite close to ideal 0.025 cd/m². So we can say that this monitor offers a very deep black.

On the other side, super-high brightness level of 340 cd/m² will allow working even when the windows are open during daytime. We are of the opinion that 200 cd/m² is enough for most uses, but extra brightness that this monitor has to offer can not be disadvantageous.

We have also found that the 'BrightRegulator' feature works excellent, you can enable it to allow monitor to set the brightness level by itself, depending on the environment illumination.

And let's mention that the monitor retains full contrast of 833:1 at all brightness levels.

Black point on Eizo FlexScan S2031W. There is some backlight leaking, but this is within tolerance.

Contrast

Contrast was measured at 833:1, which is very good.

The contrast control of this monitor is set to 50% by default, which is the optimal setting. Increasing it results in clipping the white, which (of course) doesn't increase the contrast, just degrades the picture quality.

We don't recommend both increasing the contrast and changing the color temperature ot RGB channel bias, because this will add strong tint to brightest colors. So, we recommend keeping it at 50%, or below if you have some use for lower contrast.

Anti-glare coating layer

Screen surface treatment is very good. Reflections are excellently blurred, as can be seen from the picture, and the reflectance is low. This is immediately obvious when looking at the monitor when it is turned off: the surface is dark black. This goes excellent with low black point, increasing the depth of black even more.

Anti-glare coating is very good, the monitor surface is dark black.