ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q 165Hz 2560×1440 27-in IPS G-Sync Monitor Review

Calibration and Viewing Angles

Most monitor vendors today will advertise the color accuracy of their displays to some degree on marketing material, and the ROG Swift PG279Q is no different. On the PG279Q landing page, on the ASUS website, the company calls out "100% sRGB color gamut" along with viewing angles and contrast ratios. But more often than not we find that the out of box experience with monitors can be quite poor, favoring heavy blues and oversaturated colors rather than actual color accuracy.

This screenshot above shows the output report from dispcalGUI on an uncalibrated ROG Swift PG279Q. The only change we made to the monitor before running the calibration was changing the color preset from the default (Racing I think) and instead set it to sRGB. This should get the monitor pretty close to what ASUS believes is the calibrated state of the panel, and to our surprise, the results are incredibly good!

The grays in the report show Delta E ragints of less than 1.25 which is very good for an out of box experience. The only colors that stray into the are red, green and yellow, and even then only the red result shows a Delta E score that is far enough outside the accepted range to warrant a red flag. Keep in mind that though these results show the panel isn't perfectly tuned to sRGB color, it actually exceeds the color gamut of sRGB. That makes colors for vivid and more saturated, though not always accurate.

After going through our entire calibration process (which takes about 4 hours these days) we were able to get the ROG Swift PG279Q to a nearly perfect accuracy margin with only a single shade exceeding a Delta E score over 2.0.

To calibrate this correctly, we had to use one of the ASUS included color presets and then modify from there – there is no true User setting. At least the ASUS panel allows you to reset the color settings on the presets should you wish to revert to the original firmware results.

Calibration Profile Download

The Windows color profile management interface is a bit of a mess, with the need to select and enable a profile in multiple layers of the interface. The best guide for loading and enabling a profile can be found over at TFTCentral. We used the following tools to generate our own calibration profile:

• Datacolor Spyder 4
• ArgyllCMS (calibration software suite)
• dispcalGUI (Graphical interface for Argyll CMS)
• HCFR (for additional verification and output graphs)

Our calibration profile was created using the lowest calibration speed in a dimly lit room. Here are the required settings if you wish to use our profile:

• FPS mode
• Brightness: 18
• Red: 100 (default)
• Green: 96
• Blue: 96
• Profile download: (HERE)

The above profile was created specifically for a color temperature target of 6500K at a luminance of 120 cd/m2 (nit). Gamma 2.2. Remember that the only way to get a correct calibration on your specific panel is by using a colorimeter on that very panel. The above settings and profile will only get *your* display to a perfect calibration if it has the exact same properties as our test sample. A perfect match is unlikely, but this should get you far closer to calibrated than just running with defaults.

Viewing Angles

Since the ASUS ROG Swift PG279Q is an IPS screen we expect viewing angles from all directions to be solid. 

Front

Left

Right

Bottom

Top

Upper Right

We do see a little bit of brightness variance at extreme angles but there is little to no color shift, just as expected. This is the biggest advantage IPS screens have over TN options.