5 Top Monitors For Nintendo Switch Ranked

Contrast ratio is responsible for making images appear “dynamic” and “dramatic.” By having a good contrast ratio, a monitor is able to recreate dramatic differences between light and dark spots in scenes, images and games accurately.

At a minimum, we recommend a contrast ratio of 1000:1, as this will do a good enough job at allow for detail in dark scenes and images. If contrast ratio gets too low, the picture quality suffers, and the monitor performs worse across the board, no matter the lighting condition. By getting a monitor with a sufficiently high contrast ratio, you can ensure the picture quality doesn’t suffer, and dramatic scenes with stark shifts in lighting, whether they be in games or videos, are created as accurately as possible.

Input lag is more of a concern when it comes to gaming, but if you plan on using a monitor for a bit of gaming when you aren’t focused on productivity, editing or other tasks, lower values help improve responsiveness. High input lag means your actions take longer to register on the monitor, effectively introducing an artificial delay to your reactions.

It’s for this reason that we generally recommend an input lag under 15 ms. This ensures the delay that’s introduced has minimal impact on your reactions to what’s happening on screen. It’s important to note that a high input lag won’t have any real effect on anything that isn’t gaming, so it can be safely ignored if you don’t plan on gaming on your monitor.

Color gamut is responsible for making a monitor produce accurate colors when displaying a variety of content. The DCI P3 xy gamut is considered a “standard” gamut of sorts, and is used to help color grade films. Most HDR content will use this gamut at the very least (though other gamut exist) and it’s a commonly used gamut for films.

When it comes to a computer monitor, having a panel that covers at least 90% of the DCI P3 gamut means it’ll output accurate colors when watching HDR content and movies that use the gamut. If a monitor doesn’t cover enough of the gamut, it causes color inaccuracies and shifts the image quality. If you care about maintaining accuracy in the movies you watch so they look the way they were intended, this gamut needs to be properly covered.

Response time measures how long it takes pixels to change from one color to another, often gray to gray. Low response times means the monitor is able to keep up with constant shifts in colors, and helps prevent motion blur from being introduced whatever you’re watching.

We generally recommend a response time that is 13 ms or less, as this will keep motion blur to a minimum, but if you don’t watch a lot of very high intensity videos or play fast-paced games, response time isn’t going to matter much. It’s important to note that monitors will often advertise a 1ms or 2ms or 5ms response time, to name a few, but response time tests measure full color to color shifts, as well as overshoots, which produces different times than what the monitor often claims on the box. This is why response time is a listed spec, but also a testable criterion.