About DisplayNinja

Finding the right information is hard. We’re to provide simple, transparent and honest tips, recommendations & educational content.

Get expert opinions and product tests of all the latest and greatest monitors & TVs.

There’s an easier way to find the right display for you – and we’re here to help you find it.

What We Do

Our main tasks involve reviewing monitors and TVs and recommending the best ones for different use cases and budget constraints.

We rely heavily on proper research techniques in order to rate & recommend the best possible products for you.

Furthermore, we write dozens of helpful informational articles based on topics that we have identified again and again throughout our research and work experience.

Our Mission

We strive to publish the most up-to-date, simple and most useful reviews of monitors and TVs in order to help you discover, research and select the most appropriate display for you.

What Products Do We Test?

We are currently reviewing monitors, though we plan to review TV’s at some point as well.

Furthermore, we review other components or hardware in related fields, though very limited. For these other categories, we only curate buying guides based on very comprehensive research in order to recommend you the best products. Though this is very limited, as we’re most knowledgeable in display technology and can recommend displays much more confidently.

If you have a specific monitor or TV that you want us to review, please let us know here.

Who We Are

The origin of DisplayNinja starts all the way back in 2015, where the website 144HzMonitors.com was launched.

The founder, Benjamin Jackson, who had just finished his Computer Science master’s degree in Caltech, decided to focus on a relatively new type of monitors at that time, high refresh-rate monitors.

He did that by researching heavily online and with his computer science skillset, he quickly became knowledgeable in the field and began writing in his blog.

After some time, he composed his first buying guide, a guide on how to select the best gaming monitor. It quickly became very popular and was shared widely across the web and in social media.

He looked through as many comments as he could every week and updated it monthly based on the updated market status and user feedback. All while creating other helpful & informational articles that were helping visitors, as well as news of new monitors being announced.

144HzMonitors quickly became a trusted authority and amassed hundreds of thousands of visits every month as well as being featured in numerous trusted magazines.

6 months after the launch, Joseph Moore joined the team. He had over 20 years of experience writing about technology so he was an ideal addition, and after some time he was chosen to be the head editor as his writing skills & techniques were impeccable.

Rob Shafer, a Colorado-based software engineer, joined the team after around 9 months of operations. He didn’t have as much prior experience writing about displays, but after a 6-month internship, which mostly involved studying & researching, he became a valuable addition to the team and started testing & recommended displays after that.

With his background in computer science and software engineering, Rob was the ideal candidate to join the team. The Colorado native has a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Denver and used to work part-time at a marketing agency. He recently quit his part-time job to work full-time at DisplayNinja.

In April 2018, the founder of 144HzMonitors.com decided to rebrand the site with a better name, better content, and with much better user experience.

DisplayNinja was born.

Content on 144HzMonitors.com was (and still is) thoroughly reviewed, heavily improved and published on DisplayNinja. The old link on 144HzMonitors is then redirected to the new and improved version on DisplayNinja. This process has not yet finished and will continue until all the most important content topics have been re-made.

As of June 2019, DisplayNinja had been acquired by the Danish media publishing company, Flexter. The highly dedicated and experienced team behind DisplayNinja would continue to operate with the new owner, but now Rob Shafer was given the role as the Head Editor, and Joseph Moore became the Assistant Editor.

DisplayNinja was quickly overhauled and additional job openings quickly opened in order to keep DisplayNinja as the go-to resource for display searchers around the world. DisplayNinja will be joining a growing number of brands that focus on the same overall topics – gaming & technology. One of these brands is GamingScan, a popular gaming magazine with over a million monthly visitors & over a million monthly YouTube viewers.

Another newer brand is GPU Mag, which is a website dedicated exclusively to graphics cards.

If you have suggestions or other things that you think we could cover better, please send us your valuable feedback.

Where We Are Featured

How We Are Monetized

DisplayNinja is part of a company. We have a lot of operational expenses, such as:

• Web hosting
• E-mail hosting
• Payrolls for our editors
• Purchasing products

In order for us to pay our expenses and to generate a profit for our investors, we use referral links.

Whenever you purchase a product after clicking on one of our referral links, we may earn a commission.

The referral links do not cost you anything extra. You just help support us for free.

Referral links simply tell the website that you are referred to that you came from DisplayNinja.com.

Not all of our external links are referral links, and they do not affect our product ratings or selections in any way.

Furthermore, we’re monetized by the Google AdSense program, which allows publishers like us to earn revenue by displaying ads. We only display non-intrusive and safe ads since they are vetted by Google.

All this allows us to serve you content for free without any annoying ads or paywalls.

Sometimes companies send us products to review and we accept this. However, we do not rate these products any higher than if we bought it ourselves.

Companies cannot pay us to rate their products higher or to select them for our roundups.

How We Review Products

First, we research what product should be reviewed. We select popular and new displays, but we also give equal priority to TVs and monitors that may be less known but offer exceptional quality and value for the money.

This way, you can see what the newest displays are like and how they compare to popular models. Moreover, you may discover some monitors and TVs you haven’t heard about that offer just what you were looking for.

We keep our reviews short and simple, but we don’t skip important details; We’ll cover everything you need to look out for when buying a new monitor or TV. If something isn’t explained in depth, we provide links to our knowledge-base articles where you can learn more about the subject.

We always include several alternatives in our reviews in case there’s a similar display from another brand or if a different type of display is available within the same price range. Old reviews are also always up to date as they get updated when a better alternative becomes available.

In June 2019, we went through all our reviews & updated their scores based on the current market status & price point as better alternatives may have become available.

Image Accuracy

The first thing we test is the monitor’s image accuracy out of the box.

We want to see how accurate the picture is in terms of color accuracy, color temperature and gamma when using the monitor’s default preset.

We also test other presets and options to see if there are any changes to be made that could improve the image accuracy.

For these tests, we’re using a Datacolor SpyderX Pro colorimeter and DisplayCAL software, which gives us a result such as this one:

On the far left and right, we can see Delta E values (for instance, for red color, it is 3.71), which tells how much it deviates from the target (correct) color. Ideally, Delta E shouldn’t be above 3 (as the human eye can hardly distinguish inaccuracies past that), while the average Delta E should be below 1.5.

Besides a bad factory calibration, a high Delta E could be a result of the monitor’s narrow color gamut (its colors don’t actually cover the target color) or too wide color gamut, which causes over-saturation when viewing sRGB content – though this can be fixed by using an sRGB emulation mode if it’s available.

We also test the sRGB mode and other color space modes in case a monitor (usually a professional photo editing model) has more presets.

Next, we measure the color temperature. A color temperature of 6500K is the standard and means that the whitepoint is white – without yellow or blue tint. Lower color temperature (for instance, 5000K) has a yellowish tint, whereas high color temperatures add a bluish tint to white.

Sometimes a monitor might ship with a Warm color temperature preset, which is why we measure all presets and recommend whichever is closest to 6500K.

Finally, we test the gamma. A gamma that’s too high will make dark scenes appear darker than intended, while too low gamma has the image brighter than it should be. If a monitor has multiple gamma options available, we test those as well to determine which mode is the closest to the 2.2 (sRGB tone curve) gamma target.

We also measure the monitor’s color gamut: how much it covers the sRGB, DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB color spaces, and its overall native gamut volume relative to sRGB. If a monitor targets multiple color spaces and has dedicated modes for each color gamut, we measure them as well.

Lastly, we measure the monitor’s maximum and minimum brightness, as well as its contrast ratio at 200-nits.

Calibration

We also calibrate the monitors we test and present the calibration results.

You can download our ICC profiles and apply them to your monitor. However, keep in mind that since each individual unit of a monitor is at least slightly different, you may not get as good results.

For instance, if the color gain settings of 100 red, 100 green and 90 blue on our unit give us a 6500K color temperature, those adjustments on your unit might give different results, potentially making the image even less accurate than it was before. The same goes for gamma and color accuracy with ICC profiles.

Basically, your unit must have the same (or at least very similar) inaccuracies as our unit for our profile to work, which is usually possible only if both units are from the same manufacturing batch – but you never know and it doesn’t hurt to try.

You can see how to install an ICC profile here, and if the image doesn’t seem right to you, then simply revert to the default profile.

Quality Control

Next, we thoroughly check if the monitor has any dead or stuck pixels, excessive backlight bleeding and/or IPS/VA glow, pixel inversion artifacts, frame skipping or image retention issues.

Properly capturing IPS/VA glow, backlight bleeding, FALD blooming and viewing angles on a camera is very difficult, so we avoid posting these photos as they can make the issue look better or worse than real-world use, especially after considering that the photos will be viewed on various differently calibrated displays.

We will, however, note in a review if a monitor has too much glowing, bleeding or other visual artifacts – and if its viewing angles are different than expected from the panel technology they’re using.

Another thing we test is the display’s brightness and contrast uniformity using DisplayCAL.

We measure the brightness of 100% white and 75%, 50% and 25% gray at different parts of the screen to see how much it deviates from the brightness measured in the center of the screen.

Finally, we’ll report if there are any other, more specific things to keep in mind, such as the risk of burn-in (and if it’s covered by warranty) and text sharpness being affected by the use of chroma subsampling or peculiar subpixel layouts.

HDR

For HDR, we’re testing with the ColorHCFR software to measure PQ EOTF tracking (brightness accuracy at different levels), color saturation and color temperature.

As monitors can have different EOTF tracking depending on your GPU (mainly when the monitor supports FreeSync Premium Pro), we test with both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards to see if there are any differences.

We also have HDR videos with different sizes of white windows (100%, 75%, 10%, 5%, etc.) or APL (Average Picture Level) to test peak brightness, and we measure the luminance of the Uniform Brightness setting if a display has one, as well as the sustained brightness (changes over 5 minutes) and different HDR presets.

Performance

For pixel response time speed and input lag testing, we’re using OSRTT.

We’re also using Blur Buster’s UFO ghosting test with 960 Pixels Per Sec, shutter speed set to 1/4 of the refresh rate with fixed focus, ISO and color temperature (6500K). Before the tests, the monitors are calibrated and warmed up.

In the image above, you can see an example of pixel response time speed chart of the BenQ XL2566K at 360Hz using the High overdrive mode.

We test every overdrive mode available on a monitor at fixed refresh rates (60Hz, 120Hz, 240Hz, 360Hz, etc.) and with variable refresh rate enabled.

On some monitors, such as the Cooler Master GA271, overdrive can behave differently depending on the graphics card (AMD or NVIDIA), in which case we repeat tests for both GPUs. We also plan on adding an Intel dGPU to the mix soon.

The first table shows GtG (gray to gray) pixel transition speed, for instance from 102 to 51 is 1.1ms. For a good performance, the average initial time should be lower than the monitor’s refresh window, and the overall percentage of pixel transitions within that window should be at least 75%.

Too high overshoot results in inverse ghosting, but as long as the average error is below 15%, it’s usually not noticeable in real use.

We also post pursuit photos using the UFO ghosting test to illustrate these pixel measures in real-world use and compare them with other displays.

Some gaming monitors also have a backlight strobing technology, in which case we’ll test what’s the minimum and maximum refresh rate it can operate at, whether it can work at the same time as VRR and measure its maximum brightness at different settings.

For models with good implementation, we’ll also take photos of strobe crosstalk at different parts of the screen (top, middle and bottom).

Next, we test variable refresh rate performance.

Since browsers don’t support variable refresh rates, we cannot use Blur Buster’s UFO ghosting test for this.

Instead, we use the Smooth Frog application, which allows us to thoroughly and easily test for brightness flickering, LFC threshold and overdrive behavior. Of course, we’ll also test the monitor in several games to see how it performs.

We also use OSRTT to measure display latency at 60Hz, 120Hz and at the maximum refresh rate of the monitor.

As long as the display lag is lower than the refresh rate cycle (below 16.67ms at 60Hz, for instance), it’s a good result as you won’t be able to notice any delay between your actions and the result on the screen.

In each review, you’ll also find charts that depict how the monitors compare to each other in terms of color accuracy out of the box, color gamut, min/max brightness, contrast ratio, HDR brightness, response time, input lag and more.

Finally, we use a camera to test if a monitor has a flicker-free backlight (if it uses PWM – Pulse Width Modulation to regulate brightness at lower brightness settings) and measure the color temperature of the monitor’s low-blue light filter modes.

Features

We also cover what features are available in all monitors, and more importantly, what features are missing (if there are any).

Some of these include:

• KVM functionality
• PiP/PbP (Picture in Picture, Picture by Picture)
• Auto Input Switch
• RGB lighting
• Advanced picture adjustments (gamma, 6-axis hue/saturation, sharpness)
• Black Equalizer, Color Vibrance (different names depending on the brand)
• Gaming features (crosshair overlays, refresh rate trackers, on-screen timers)
• Display scaling, picture presets, etc.

Some monitors also offer an accompanying desktop application for OSD-related settings, in which case we’ll test that as well.

In case such an application is not available, we will check if the monitor supports DDC/CI, that is, if you can adjust monitor settings using your keyboard/mouse via third-party apps, such as ControlMyMonitor and ClickMonitorDDC.

We’ll also go over the OSD (On-Screen Display) menu layout, navigation, hotkeys, shortcuts, etc.

Design

When examining the design of a display, we mainly focus on its ergonomic abilities as well as build quality, stability and VESA mount compatibility.

We’ll also include a few words about the aesthetics of the display and its screen surface treatment, including how much graininess a matte coating adds to the image, how effective it is against reflections, whether it raises the black levels if hit by direct lighting, etc.

Connectivity

We make sure to mention all connectivity options as well as what their maximum supported refresh rate and resolutions are – something that manufacturers don’t always specify, which often causes confusion. A few examples include:

• HDMI 2.1 bandwidth – it’s usually 18 Gbps (previously HDMI 2.0), 24 Gbps with DSC, or full 48 Gbps
• Whether DisplayPort uses HBR2 (21.6 Gbs) or HBR3 (32.40 Gbps) transmission mode
• If the monitor needs to use DSC (Display Stream Compression) or chroma subsampling to achieve its maximum refresh rate/resolution
• If the USB-C port supports DP Alt Mode and Power Delivery

How We Rate Products

Our products are rated on a scale from 1 to 5. We rate the product’s design (build quality and versatility), display (image quality), performance, and price/value.

Design

In our reviews, a monitor’s design rating is based on the overall build quality, stability, and versatility (whether it can be tilted, swiveled, height-adjusted, rotated, and VESA mounted).

The rating also takes into account a monitor’s hotkeys: how easy/difficult is it to use them to navigate through the OSD menu.

Moreover, a monitor gets bonus points for extra accessories such as a headphones hook, a shading hood, devices for remote OSD control, etc and loses points for insufficiencies such as a wobbly stand, cheap build materials, and so on.

Display

The display rating determines the image quality and the general viewing experience. Keep in mind though that if, for instance, a $200 monitor gets 4/5 for Display, but a $1000 monitor gets 3.5/5, it doesn’t mean the $200 has a better image quality.

The display rating takes into account the monitor’s price range as well as the display quality of similarly priced monitors. Competitively priced monitors will always be mentioned in the ‘Price & Similar Monitors’ section of our reviews and we always urge you to check them out as well.

Performance

Just like the display rating, the performance mark takes into account the monitor’s price and the performance of similarly priced monitors.

The performance rating is based on the display’s input lag, response time, overdrive implementation, and availability (or lack of) features that impact the performance, such as VRR, backlight strobing, flicker-free technology, etc.

Price/Value

The price/value rating indicates how good value you’re getting for your money. Note that this rating often gets updated as new monitors get released. In addition, we may change other ratings in our reviews when new and similar displays get released with better image quality, performance, and/or design for the money.

Our Company Relationships

We love transparency. Here is a list of all our referral relationships as well as products that we’ve received for free.

We update the table above from time to time, so it might not always be completely up-to-date. If you want to know for sure if we have received a specific product for free or if we have an affiliate relationship with a particular company, then get in touch with us here.

Do You Have Questions?

Do you still have any questions? Want to get our help in picking the right display for you? Have a new monitor or TV you want us to test and review?

Then please do not hesitate to contact us! We’ll try to get back to you within 24 hours during weekdays.