MSI MAG 272QP QD-OLED X50 Review (500Hz QD-OLED)

1. Introduction2. Design3. On-screen Display (OSD)4. Panel Analysis: SDR5. Panel Analysis: HDR6. Response Times & Motion Clarity7. Input Latency8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

HDR Testing

Following on from the SDR results on the previous page, here we re-test the relevant areas of the display with HDR enabled.

MSI includes three different HDR modes – True Black 500, Peak 1000 nits, and a new EOTF Boost mode.

Brightness

The first thing to establish is that both the Peak 1000 nits mode behaves as expected, hitting over 1000 nits at the 1% and 2% APLs, before dropping back – and the EOTF Boost mode exhibits identical behaviour.

The True Black 500 mode is much like previous True Black 400 offerings, except it's brighter across the board – hence the new certification.

We can see that, compared to the 272URX, the new 272QP X50's True Black 500 mode is indeed a good chunk brighter than the older True Black 400 mode, regardless of APL.

The same also goes for the Peak 1000 nits mode – it's slightly brighter here than with the 272URX for all window sizes bar the 1% and 2% APLs, so that's good to see.

EOTF Tracking

What's really interesting though, is the new EOTF Boost mode – designed to fix the issue with the Peak 1000 nits mode, where the EOTF tracking rolls off increasingly early as window size increases – resulting in the image looking overly dark. For these synthetic tests, the EOTF Boost mode looks fantastic, producing a much more accurate EOTF tracking, and generally that translates in the real world.

The key thing to note, though, is that the EOTF Boost mode doesn't actually fix the native panel dimming, which would result in images looking too dark – rather, it is a software bypass, and as Tim from Monitor's Unboxed has pointed out, you can occasionally still see the panel brightening and dimming as the scene's brightness changes from dark to light and vice versa.

However, in general use I didn't really notice that often and to my eye, the EOTF Boost mode looks a good bit brighter than the Peak 1000 nits mode, which is great to see. The difference isn't that noticeable in darker scenes with a low APL, given there's no panel dimming in those scenarios anyway, but in brighter scenes you can definitely tell the difference.

Colour Accuracy

It's good to see high levels of HDR accuracy, too, with the worst results come from the 100% green and 100% cyan channels, which was always going to be the case considering the 272QP X50 doesn't cover the whole Rec.2020 colour space.

Become a Patron!