When comparing LG 25UM57 vs BenQ ZOWIE XL2411, the Slant community recommends LG 25UM57 for most people. In the question“What are the best monitors?” LG 25UM57 is ranked 6th while BenQ ZOWIE XL2411 is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose LG 25UM57 is:
The fact that a monitor of this price range has a 5M:1 contrast ratio is simply astonishing. This means users get cinema-like picture quality right at their desk.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Cinema-like picture quality for an affordable price
The fact that a monitor of this price range has a 5M:1 contrast ratio is simply astonishing. This means users get cinema-like picture quality right at their desk.
Pro Good sound quality with no need for external speakers
This monitor's speakers are as good as those found on small TVs. They're located in the back and come with an audio jack for headphone connectivity.
Pro Immersive
The 2560x1080 resolution creates an immersive setup. This applies even for work tasks: multiple documents can be displayed side-by-side with no legibility sacrifice. It's equivalent to having two monitors with 1280x1080 screens.
Pro Advantageous for all uses
This monitor's ultrawide screen has advantages for all uses. When it comes to movie watching or gaming, the screen size contributes to a truly engaging experience. As far as general productivity goes, the ultrawide screen makes it easy to have different applications or documents open side by side.
Pro Great for watching movies
The 21:9 aspect ratio comes in handy when watching movies. This is the default aspect ratio at which almost all of the films are shot. Hence, you can watch your movies without having two black bars at the top and bottom of the screen.
Pro Intuitive OSD
The most in-depth settings of the monitor are usually just 5-10 clicks away.
Pro Flicker-free
The backlight of this monitor does not cause flickering. Instead of using the conventional PWM backlight dimming technique, this monitor dims its backlight by the aid of DC voltage, which eliminates the unwanted effect of flickering. Monitor flickering is one of the primary sources of fatigue and eye strain and should be taken very seriously, especially by those who spend a lot of time in front of a monitor.
Pro Can fight glare
The panel of the ZOWIE XL241 has enough brightness to fight glare, making it an excellent monitor for bright rooms.
Pro High refresh rate
You'll receive faster picture updates than your rivals who play on slower panels because of the monitor's native refresh rate of 144 Hz, which is among the highest in this price range.
The monitor's native refresh rate tells how much frames its panel can show each second while working at the native resolution. The faster is the panel, the more frames it can process and display.
Pro Well-handled motion
The ZOWIE XL2411 can reproduce clear motion, free of artificial motion blur and ghosting effects as each pixel of the monitor can change its color within only one millisecond. It is on par with what the best monitors in this price range offer.
Note that the overdrive feature is used to achieve such fast pixel response. In some cases, pixel overdrive makes the pixels overshoot their target values which causes artificial effects. Nonetheless, this can be avoided by not setting the overdrive setting to its maximum.
Pro Lag-free
This monitor offers a responsive and lag-free gaming experience because of its fantastically low input lag of only 3.2 ms. In terms of input lag, the XL2411 outperforms every single competitor in its price range.
The monitor's input lag corresponds to the delay between a video card producing a frame and the frame being processed by a monitor. Lowe input lag means controls feel more responsive onscreen when gaming.
Pro Good picture quality
When it comes to picture quality, the BenQ ZOWIE XL2411 does have a lot to offer as the monitor's contrast ratio, peak brightness, and color accuracy are on par with what the best gaming monitors in this price range offer.
This gaming monitor can display eye-catching dark and bright scenes, full of luminous, and accurate colors. Dark scenes look good because of the monitor's native contrast ratio of 1090:1, which is high enough to make blacks appear truly deep. Bright scenes look genuinely luminous because of the monitor's high peak brightness of 350 nits, which combined with the panel's excellent color accuracy reproduce vivid and life-like colors.
Pro Good for gaming
The BenQ ZOWIE XL2411 has enough juice to be one of the best gaming monitors in its price range. It combines low input lag, fast pixel response time, and high native refresh rate with excellent overall picture quality.
Cons
Con Limited connectivity
This monitor has two HMDI ports, which is pretty good. However, it misses other display inputs such as DVI or Display Port, making incompatible with older computers.
Con Lack of support for ultra-widescreen in (old) games
A handful of games do not support 21:9 aspect ratio by default. Some examples are Overwatch, Fallout 3, and Starcraft 2. If this is important for you, it is recommended you test this issue before getting this monitor. But there are solutions: you can either install fixes (only available for some games) or play in windowed mode, using a different aspect ratio.
Con Slow response time
A response time of 5 ms on a gaming monitor is pretty awful. Considering its refresh rate, it is understandable but not acceptable. Note that this response time is from gray-to-gray.
Con 720p and 1080p videos are sandwhiched
This monitor's aspect ratio means that many online videos, such as those from Netflix or YouTube, will have black spaces on the sides, which can be annoying.
Con Lacks adaptive syncing
This monitor is not compatible with neither AMD’s Free-Sync nor Nvidia's G-Sync, which might be a deal breaker for newer systems.
Con Default settings are useless
To get the most out of monitor's picture quality, you'll need to spend some time adjusting its settings. Luckily, all the key setting values are available on the Internet.
The monitor's default color profile, FPS1, is useless as it degrades colors.
Con Lacks connectivity
Connectivity-wise, the BenQ ZOWIE XL241 offers only the bare minimum. You won't get anything apart from a humble HDMI 1.4 port, DVI-DL port, D-Sub port, and a 3.5mm headphone port.