Image quality issues (colour banding and brightness) with Asus ROG Swift PG278QR (TN 144 Hz G-Sync)

[Gugelhupf]

I recently bought an Asus ROG Swift PG278QR (TN 144 Hz G-Sync) and I'm very disappointed by the image quality. I'm comparing it to my old Samsung Syncmaster S24A450BW and sadly the old monitor comes on top.

The Asus has horrible colour banding when viewing dark images, videos and sometimes even in games! I tried to reduce it using monitor adjustments and NVidia Control Panel colour settings. Basically I had the same image on both monitors and tried to get the Asus image to match the one on the Samsung. If I reduce the colour banding I'm left with a washed-out and dim image where the highlights are way too dark. If I pump those up to get a decent picture the colour banding is back and the blacks and dark areas are way too bright. There's no middle ground.

Are today's monitors worse than old ones..? Do I have to get an IPS panel in order to have decent image quality? The old monitor is also TN so I don't understand why the Asus performs so badly.

 

[Armenius]

I never had color banding issues with my PG278Q. Make sure color is set to RGB and 8-bit in the NVIDIA control panel.

 

[Colonel Sanders]

There's a pretty good chance you are just seeing details that were hidden before and now to your untrained eye it looks "wrong." Banding is somewhat normal for any typical consumer monitor because of the source material/input. For example, banding is just a fact of life in games, our eyes just get used to it and learn to ignore it. Obviously if it was extreme there could be something wrong, but I doubt there is because it'd be really hard to mess something up in your settings, hardware setup, etc these days to create that issue.

 

[Gugelhupf]

I never had color banding issues with my PG278Q. Make sure color is set to RGB and 8-bit in the NVIDIA control panel.

I'll try thtat, thanks.

There's a pretty good chance you are just seeing details that were hidden before and now to your untrained eye it looks "wrong." Banding is somewhat normal for any typical consumer monitor because of the source material/input. For example, banding is just a fact of life in games, our eyes just get used to it and learn to ignore it. Obviously if it was extreme there could be something wrong, but I doubt there is because it'd be really hard to mess something up in your settings, hardware setup, etc these days to create that issue.

I was pondering that. I've gotten so used to cheap monitors over the years that when I finally saw a good one all the small errors in textures stand out. I'll have to do more testing and see if it really bothers me that much.