ViewSonic XG2431 Monitor Review

This monitor has a simplistic design with an all-black body and a bulky stand. It has a few design features to enhance your setup like cable bungees for your mouse and a pull-out headphone rack to hang your headphones.

The build quality is good. The all-plastic body is well made and the back panel doesn't flex much. It's stable on the stand, and even if the ergonomic adjustments feel stiff, the screen stays in place.

The ViewSonic OMNI XG2431 has excellent ergonomics. It's easy to adjust, but because you can only rotate it into portrait mode in one direction, the inputs always face to the left. Luckily, there's a detachable hook that you can use for cable management.

There are five buttons to navigate the on-screen display and a power button underneath the right side of the screen.

• DisplayPort cable
• USB-A to USB-B cable
• Power cable
• Cable management clip
• User documentation

The ViewSonic OMNI XG2431 has a low native contrast ratio. Blacks look gray in the dark, and there's no local dimming feature to improve it.

The ViewSonic OMNI XG2431 doesn't have a local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so you can compare the backlight performance with a monitor that has local dimming.

The SDR brightness is good. It's bright enough to fight glare in rooms with a few lights around, and it maintains its brightness consistent across different content. These results are from after calibration in the 'Standard' View Mode with the Color Temperature set to 'User Color' and the Brightness at its max.

This monitor has decent HDR brightness. While it's bright, small highlights don't pop against the rest of the screen as it doesn't have a local dimming feature. The EOTF follows the target PQ curve well for most scenes, and it lets highlights get the brightest they can before a sharp cut-off at the peak brightness, but dark scenes are too bright. These results are with HDR set to 'Auto' as there are no picture settings in HDR.

This monitor has an excellent horizontal viewing angle. The image remains consistent even from the sides, great for sharing your screen with others.

The vertical viewing angle is okay. It loses consistency quicker than the horizontal viewing angle, but this is normal for most monitors. It's fine if you're standing up and looking down at the screen.

The ViewSonic OMNI XG2431 has great gray uniformity. The edges of the screen are a bit darker, which you'll notice with full-screen webpages or games with large areas of uniform colors, but there's hardly any dirty screen effect in the center.

The black uniformity is poor. There's backlight bleed and clouding throughout, which can get distracting in dark scenes, and there's no local dimming feature to improve it.

The accuracy before calibration is great. There are some inaccuracies to most colors and the white balance, but they're minor, and the color temperature is fairly close to the 6500K target. Although it has an sRGB mode, it still performs similarly to 'Standard' as it doesn't effectively clamp colors to the sRGB color space and has worse gamma tracking, as you can see here.

The accuracy after calibration is incredible and it fixes any inaccuracies from before calibration.

The SDR color gamut is fantastic. It has perfect coverage of the sRGB color space used in most web content, and it displays colors well. However, it has limited Adobe RGB color space coverage, and greens and cyan are off. This isn't ideal if you're a photo editor and use this color space.

The HDR color gamut is mediocre. It fails to display a wide range of colors in both the common DCI-P3 color space and the wider Rec. 2020 color space.

The HDR color volume is alright. It's limited by the narrow color gamut, and struggles to display bright and dark colors well.

The text clarity is decent. Enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) helps make letters easier to read.

The reflection handling is great. The matte finish does a good job of absorbing and diffusing light across the screen. Combined with the good peak brightness, you won't have many issues using it in a room with a few lights around.

The gradient handling is fantastic. You won't see any banding in scenes with shades of similar colors, like a sunset.

The motion handling is impressive across the monitor's VRR range. The 'Advanced' Response Time overdrive is extremely consistent, and there isn't any noticeable inverse ghosting at lower refresh rates. These results are with the 'Custom' Color Temperature, but the 'Ultra Fast' overdrive setting performs differently with Color Temperature set to 'Native.' In that case, 'Ultra Fast' is better to use that if you prefer using 'Native' Color Temperature. You can see how the overdrive settings perform with the two different Color Temperature settings here.

The refresh rate compliance is great. Although its response time isn't fast enough to make full color transitions at 240Hz, it's a lot better at lower refresh rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 240Hz is great. Motion looks sharp, and there isn't any obvious inverse ghosting, either. Although 'Ultra Fast' has lower CAD than the recommended overdrive of 'Advanced', it has a lot more inverse ghosting. However, this only happens with Custom Temperature set to 'Custom', as 'Ultra Fast' is the recommended setting if you set Color Temperature to 'Native' instead.

The CAD at 120Hz is great. Similar to its max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive is 'Advanced' as it has minimal blur and smearing. Like at the max refresh rate, the 'Ultra Fast' overdrive setting is better if you set Color Temperature to 'Native' instead of 'Custom'.

The CAD at 60Hz is very good. The recommended overdrive is once again 'Advanced' because it has less blur than 'Standard' and less inverse ghosting than 'Ultra Fast.' Unlike at higher refresh rates, the recommended overdrive setting is 'Advanced' whether you set Color Temperature to 'Custom' or 'Native.'

The ViewSonic OMNI XG2431 has an optional backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur called PureXP, and it's certified in the Blur Busters Approved Certification Programme, Version 2.0. It's customizable as you can adjust the setting to different modes, and there's also a 'Custom' mode that allows you to control the pulse width and phase and the overdrive. You need to download the ViewSonic Strobe Utility application with the USB-B cable connected to the computer to use it. The photo above is at 240Hz in the 'Ultra' mode, and you can also see the performance with other modes and refresh rates above.

This monitor doesn't have any noticeable VRR flicker with changing frame rates, which is good for gaming. The flicker in the graphs is noise and is hard to see in most content.

This monitor has a flicker-free backlight with all brightness levels, which can help reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to flicker. The graphs have noise from the backlight, but it isn't actual flicker.

This monitor has low input lag for a quick and responsive gaming experience.

This monitor can't take full advantage of the PS5 as it's limited to a 1080p resolution and lacks HDMI 2.1 bandwidth.

This monitor can't take full advantage of the Xbox Series X|S as it's limited to a 1080p resolution and lacks HDMI 2.1 bandwidth. However, you can enable the console's HDMI override setting to get 1440p @ 60Hz, but that disables VRR. Luckily, it downscales 4k signals, which is useful because the Xbox only supports HDR with 4k signals.

The ViewSonic OMNI XG2431 works with macOS, but there are some limitations. VRR works with games, but it flickers on the desktop. In HDR, colors look washed out, and the contrast is off. It's best to use it in SDR with a fixed refresh rate. If you're using a MacBook, windows go back to their proper screens when waking up from sleep, but at times they don't after closing the laptop lid.

This monitor has a few extra features to improve the user experience, including:

• Advanced Dynamic Contrast Ratio: Changes the black levels on a per-scene basis.
• Blue Light Filter: Removes blue light to reduce eye strain.
• Black Stabilization: Adjusts the gamma so you can see opponents better in the shadows.
• Eco Mode: Limits the power your monitor needs.