As you can imagine, pricing is one of the most important factors of any purchasing decision. We can find the perfect product for our needs, that fits the brief in every single way. But if it doesn’t fit our budgets, we simply can’t (or at least shouldn’t) buy it. The Color menu offers seven presets. The default is “Photography (P3 D65),and, as the name implies, is meant for use with the DCI-P3 color space. The web and a lot of movies and streaming you’ll be doing is in SDR though, so the U28 also offers an sRGB mode, Design for the web (sRGB D65). The OSD shows values for red, green, blue, white point and gamma for those two presets, as well as for the HD video (BT.709) and Design for print (sRGB D50) presets, but they aren’t adjustable. In all three modes, gamma is in the 1.9 range instead of the ideal 2.2. In the P3 and Standard modes the errors are particularly extreme at 10% and 70-95% brightness. Typically, we’d say you’re not likely to use your monitor at 10% brightness often, but the U28 gets pretty bright, and if you want to use it in a dark room you may be dropping brightness significantly. At that point, details in shadows, like the arches in a stone wall in Mission: Impossible, became harder to see, but it wasn’t a massive issue. When it comes to the all important specs the max screen resolution is 3840 x 2160 pixels, the refresh rate is 60 Hz, and the response time is 1 ms. and can run at 60 Hz.

It’s unfortunate that the U28 doesn’t let you swap to its P3 preset with HDR mode, as it did a better job of hitting the P3 color targets. In the chart above, the U28 fails to hit the triangle’s most outer red target. It also doesn’t reach outer targets for green, cyan, blue or magenta. As a result, HDR content generally looked more colorful with HDR off and in P3 mode than with HDR on. But I noticed some detail loss in shadowy areas with HDR off. Power menu has a Power Mode, where you can activate a Power Saver mode that disables some features,like USB-C video, USB power delivery and the wake from sleep via PC function. There’s also an Auto-sleep Mode, but you can’t control the timing; it’s either on or off. In its default mode Color Mode, the U28 peaked at 461.7 nits brightness. That already exceeds its minimum maximum brightness claim of 400 nits; however, we found an even brighter image in the Standard Color Mode, where we squeezed out an additional 12.7 nits. This is a bright monitor, and on a sunny day with a lot of sun reflecting off snow and through a nearby window, I had no trouble working at just 45% brightness. The next brightest monitor in our comparison group is still behind the HP by 68.7 nits. The Color menu also has presets called Standard, Gaming, Night and HP Enhance+, which you can set to Low, Medium or High. Standard looks very similar to the Photography mode, targeting the P3 color space, as we’ll see in the following tests. HP Enhance+, meanwhile, is supposed to sharpen the display, but I felt it looked artificial and made some text look oddly uneven. There’s also an RGB Gain Adjust section in the Color Menu with sliders (up to 1,023) for red, green and blue. More information on quality can be found in this old but still very helpful article from Harvard Business Review.Sounds more like a badge and a firmware tweak slapped on to a traditional SDR panel that already had decent P3-D65 coverage. That's pretty shameful.

For web surfing and the like, the U28 chooses accuracy above oversaturation. All of the other monitors here oversaturate sRGB, but the U28’s sRGB mode covers nearly all the space without overdoing it, making it great for color-critical work or play. HDR Performance When it comes to the P3 color space, the U28 covers 79.7% in its designated P3 Color Mode and 79.8% in Standard mode. 80% would be good, so isn’t bad performance. However, it’s disappointing to see the cheaper AOC offer a little more color at 85.5% coverage.INCREDIBLE RESPONSE TIME – With 1-millisecond response times, motion blur is eliminated in exchange for crisp, fluid gameplay no matter what’s happening on screen The Standard mode’s P3 accuracy is particularly good news since you can squeeze a little extra contrast out of the U28 there. So let’s carry on with our HP V28 28 Inch 60Hz 4K Monitor review and explore the product’s pricing. PICTURE PERFECT – This Ultra HD 4K monitor offers 4x the pixels of Full HD for significantly sharper, more premiere image clarity, so you’ll never miss a detail (3840 x 2160 resolution at 60 Hz) And while image quality is strong, you’re not getting much more than you’ll find in similar sized or even larger monitors. For example, the 32-inch AOC CU32V3 is a curved screen with stronger contrast, due to its VA panel, and comparable, if not better, color performance. Meanwhile, the 27-inch Dell S2721QS offers similar contrast to the U28 and throws in some handy features, like speakers and a windows manager.

Next up is material. Read through the product description for HP V28 28 Inch 60Hz 4K Monitor to get an understanding of the materials the product is made from. Some materials will obviously be known for delivering better quality item than others. You might also have decided that you’ll only accept a product made from a particular material.The first is brand. Looking at the brand of the product is often a really good indicator for judging product quality. For example you’d expect a much higher quality product from a brand known for providing excellent quality than you would from an unknown or even a budget brand. Of the 65 products, we discovered that 12 were more expensive and 46 were cheaper than HP V28 28 Inch 60Hz 4K Monitor. Prices from HP The next step for us was to look at all of the products that fall within the PC monitors category, of which we found 65 products at Argos. So we pulled together all of the prices of these products to analyse the average prices as well as finding the cheapest and most expensive options. Boasting factory color calibration and accuracy worthy of video and photo editing and the like, the U28 just manages to deliver on its color accuracy claims. Its Photography P3 mode crosses the 3dE visibility mark by a hair, but we’ll give it to them. And with a 2.7 dE sRGB color error score, it’s fit for sRGB work as well. SMOOTH ENTERTAINMENT – Get fluid, artifact-free performance at virtually any frame rate with AMD FreeSync technology paired with your AMD Graphics Card

CONNECTIVITY – With DisplayPort and Dual HDMI you’ll get all the ports you need to easily connect your device for big-screen entertainmentAccording to the spec there are no on-screen controls for sound and I suspect there are no speakers. Out of the box, the U28 is set to its Photography / P3 mode, which sets the monitor at 45% brightness. That proved bright enough for getting work done from various angles. My monitor sits perpendicular from a large window, and I had no issue seeing properly with the monitor using less than half of its brightness capability. Even when I sat sideways from the monitor, I could see the image. It just looked darker, and I could see a reflection on darker scenes at the closer third of the monitor. The top view experience was similar. The HP U28 4K HDR monitor is a smart buy in that it does what it promises. Its IPS panel is colorful and accurate. Whether looking at SDR content on the web or switching to the P3 color space for creative work or movies, the monitor comes with accurate color presets that make productivity and entertainment enjoyable and true-to-life. And its bright screen makes it a good fit for any room, no matter how sunlit.