Resolution, frame rate, HDR, color reproduction, how to choose? Hisense Hard Pro monitor: I want them all

I believe everyone is familiar with the Hisense brand. As the leader of China's home appliance industry and a leading player in the black appliance industry, Hisense ranked top four in global TV shipments in the third quarter of 2020 with its 50 years of deep accumulation of video technology. This year, Hisense Electric was officially renamed Hisense Vision, indicating that Hisense will gradually expand its boundaries in the display field and deploy in more display application scenarios.

In September, Hisense Visual officially released the Hard series of gaming monitors, which includes two mid- and low-end monitors, Hard Plus, and one high-end flagship monitor, Hard Pro.

Of course, everyone is more interested in what kind of changes Hisense, the TV giant's first foray into the display industry, can bring to the industry in high-end flagship models.

Today, let's take a look at the Hard Pro 27G7F, the flagship of Hisense monitors, and see how it can stand up to the industry's top monitors.

  Games or work? "I want it all"

First of all, it has to be mentioned that the Hisense Hard Pro 27G7F monitor is not just an e-sports monitor for gamers. In addition to hardcore gaming parameters such as high score, high refresh rate and low latency, it also has high color gamut coverage and high color reproduction under the blessing of quantum dots, which perfectly meets the needs of professional image and video design.

Therefore, Hisense defines Hard Pro 27G7F as a "dual master" monitor. With its ultimate expression of gaming experience and picture quality, Hard Pro is enough to meet the various needs of professional gamers and professional designers.

For gamers, Hard Pro has a high resolution of 2560x1440, a high refresh rate of 240Hz, a peak brightness of 600 nits, supports HDR high dynamic range, and a native 1ms grayscale response speed, coupled with low-latency processing technology, which can greatly improve the gaming experience;

For image workers, Hard Pro is also a professional picture quality monitor. With the support of quantum dot technology, it achieves 130% sRGB, 103% DCI-P3, 112% aRGB color gamut coverage, 1 billion colors and ultra-low color difference ΔE<2. For designer friends who need to make pictures or edit videos, it perfectly achieves what you see is what you get.

Of course, data is cold, and all paper data still needs to be implemented in the user experience to be meaningful.

"Stop talking nonsense and look at things first"

In terms of outer packaging, the high-end Hisense Hard Pro 27G7F does not use original color cardboard boxes, but instead uses beautifully printed color packaging. The larger screen curvature makes its packaging appear thicker.

The package includes instruction manual, power cord, power adapter, DP cable, USB upstream cable, monitor body, stand and base.

It should be mentioned here that Hisense's choice to give away DP cables is quite considerate, because the current DP 1.4 protocol data transmission capacity far exceeds HDMI 2.0. Although HDMI 2.1 has surpassed DP 1.4 again, the graphics cards that support it are still rare, and only the 30 series graphics cards that are still out of stock can support it. As for the PS5 and Xbox Series X game consoles that support HDMI 2.1, they already come with HDMI cables.

Hisense Hard Pro monitor stand is made of all-metal material, with a tripod bottom to save desktop space. It is connected via a standard Vesa interface, making it very easy to install and also convenient to replace other third-party stands.

High-end monitors obviously cannot be as big, black and crude as mid- and low-end products. Hisense Hard Pro is full of bold and tough e-sports style as a whole. The two adjustable color light strips on the back visually divide the back panel into two areas.

In addition to the Hisense logo, there are two built-in speakers on the top, after all, both the HDMI and DP interfaces support audio signals. The brushed texture on the lower part makes the back more textured, and it is more wear-resistant and dirt-resistant for handling and daily use.

Under the bottom cover are arranged in sequence: the power port, HDMI port, two DP ports, a USB upstream port, and two USB ports.

At the top of the stand, there is a red deployable stand for hiding headphones for easy desktop storage. The only drawback is that this monitor does not have any cable management design, so those who are obsessive about cables will need to spend some time on it.

In terms of buttons, Hisense Hard Pro has five customizable buttons on the bottom, which can customize five image modes. For example, you can design a mode with a warmer color temperature for watching videos, a low blue light mode for night scenes, a full-power gaming mode, a graphics mode that emphasizes color restoration, etc., which is very convenient.

It is important to mention that the control keys on the back of Hisense Hard Pro inherit the joystick design of Hisense's high-end TVs, which is very suitable for blind operation, allowing you to say goodbye to the embarrassing scene of having to stop and think for a long time every time you press a button.

The front of Hisense Hard Pro is equipped with a 1000R curved screen using the fourth-generation curved technology. The larger curvature of the screen can bring smaller full-screen parallax and stronger immersion. The panel has a three-sided narrow bezel design, and the visual perception gives a sci-fi feeling that the screen is floating above the bottom.

There are three red V-shaped decorations on the bracket support rod below the screen. The black and red color scheme and tough lines are the main design style of this monitor. It has a very e-sports fashion sense and conforms to the aesthetic style of modern young people.

In-depth evaluation of multiple scenarios, "strong perception"

Now let’s get down to business and start testing the performance of this monitor in gaming scenarios.

First, let's take a look at the performance of Sony's highly anticipated next-generation console PS 5 on the Hisense Hard Pro 27G7F monitor. Unfortunately, PS5 games do not yet support a 240Hz refresh rate, but only support 120Hz at most, which is not as good as the performance of the Hisense Hard Pro.

So we mainly use PS 5 to test the HDR effect. The test game is "God of War 4". On PS5 and Hisense monitor, we experience the Nordic adventures of "God of War" and his "old father" "billions of times".

Hisense Hard Pro 27G7F monitor has obtained the Display HDR 600 certification issued by the VESA organization. Thanks to the 600 nits peak brightness and Local Dimming partition light control technology, Hisense Hard Pro can provide extremely high contrast while retaining the picture brightness information to the maximum extent.

Reflecting on the game performance of "God of War 4", we can see that the dynamic range of the game is very good. The part with direct sunlight is very bright, but the details of the scene and vegetation have not disappeared; the shadow of Kratos' fur is almost pure black, and it can be seen that the backlight LED partition has been turned off. The high-contrast game screen is closer to the original appearance of the world observed by the human eye.

As for the 240Hz high refresh rate, it must be tested with shooting games, which is the type of game that requires the highest frame rate and is also one of the most popular game types. Compared with a 144Hz monitor, a 240Hz monitor can display 67% more images, allowing players to capture more enemy dynamics.

If you feel that your skills are not very good, but you still cannot get a kill, you can think seriously about whether the knife you use to chop wood is not sharp enough?

The game I used for the test was CS GO. I could clearly feel that the 240Hz screen was smoother when I turned the view angle and moved. I felt that my motion sickness seemed to have improved a lot. However, I was still abused when using the Hisense Hard Pro monitor. I had to face it, I am just a noob…

It should be noted that the Hisense Hard Pro panel is made of VA material, which is worse than TN and IPS in terms of ghosting. Therefore, a TestUFO/Chase test was added. At a refresh rate of 240Hz, it was shot with a 1/300s lens. The background was pure white, and the color blocks were one yellow and one black. The moving speed was 960 Pixel/s. It mainly tested the ghosting of the black block. Generally speaking, this is the shortcoming of the VA panel.

However, after testing, the actual black block has only one grid of ghosting, which is amazing for a VA panel and is not inferior to a TN screen. In fact, many high-end VA screens have excellent performance in terms of ghosting recently, proving that the material is only one factor in the image quality, and the final performance still depends on the manufacturer's tuning skills. A piece of black iron, in Yang Guo's hands, is a magical weapon.

For the resolution and color test of Hisense Hard Pro display, we used Qian Yuankai's 4K TV resolution test chart. The purple arrow in the picture is for 1080P resolution display devices, and the red arrow is for 4K display devices.

After testing, for text, Hisense Hard Pro can vaguely recognize the smallest line of English in 4K, and can basically recognize the second line of Chinese; for black and white lines and color blocks, Hisense Hard Pro's performance is completely consistent with the 2K resolution screen, and the recognizable area is between 1080P and 4K areas.

Some colorful ultra-high-definition demonstration pictures and film sources, as well as excerpts from the latest American TV series "The Mandalorian" with 2K HDR specifications, were also played on Hisense Hard Pro. Judging from the picture, the display is rich in color, accurately restored, and has outstanding HDR effects.

Summarize:

After a complete test, although Hard Pro is Hisense's first monitor series and is aimed at the high-end flagship market from the beginning, Hisense's 50 years of technological accumulation in the display industry still gives it the confidence to leap forward in the display industry, achieve a breakthrough like a dimensionality reduction attack, and bring a new atmosphere to the display industry.

In the past, in order to increase sales, monitor manufacturers often deliberately differentiated product performance, forcing consumers to choose between high-score and low-refresh and low-score and high-refresh, in order to sell more products. Hisense Hard Pro did not do this, but provided a third option of "I want it all"; the 600 nit peak brightness combined with Local Dimming technology is a dimensionality reduction attack launched by the TV industry on the monitor industry, and the excellent HDR effect it brings is impressive.

HDR technology, which is the icing on the cake in film and television scenes, is a timely help in gaming scenes. High dynamic range makes many LYPs who like to hide in the dark to avoid being attacked nowhere to hide. If we want to rank the importance of display quality in games, it is obviously frame rate>HDR>resolution>color reproduction. However, Hisense Hard Pro still chose "I want them all".

In terms of color gamut coverage and color reproduction, which are not given enough attention by traditional e-sports monitors, Hisense Hard Pro has also been carefully adjusted. It can not only provide better picture quality for gamers, but also meet the needs of professional quality monitors, allowing Hisense Hard Pro monitors to easily cope with more scene requirements.

It is undeniable that with the diversification of user groups, the configuration and components of computers are increasingly showing a trend of high-end and segmented development. However, correspondingly, what users perceive most deeply is always the input/output devices in our hands and in front of us, especially the display as an output device, which serves as a bridge and medium between us and the content. Its quality directly determines the quality of our work, study, and game experience. Configuring an excellent screen has become an inevitable choice in the digital life of contemporary young people.

Hisense Hard Pro is such an excellent monitor product, and its price of about 4,000 yuan is also very competitive. It is understood that similar monitor products with similar configurations are priced at more than 5,000 to 6,000 yuan. For those consumers who pursue display quality and are willing to try a "senior" new brand, Hisense Hard Pro 27G7F monitor is a good choice that cannot be ignored.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.