NEC EA244UHD Review

Conclusions

Is a 24” UltraHD display worth it? Yes, you get a lot of pixels but they’re almost impossible to use at native resolution. I know many commenters have said they are fine with a 24” UHD display, but I can’t use it without scaling. I don’t think many people can if you’re sitting the usual 1.5-2’ away from it. If you can, consider yourself lucky to have such good vision at this point in your life.

Running with everything scaled to a resolution of 2560x1440, the EA244UHD is much more usable. Text is very crisp and there is still lots of room for editing photos and other aspects where you want high resolution. Combine this with the uniformity performance of the EA244UHD and you have a display that might make a good deal of sense for content creators.

For the average person, I’m not as certain it makes as much sense. It is cheaper than the 32” UltraHD displays by a good margin, but it isn’t as easy to use with the smaller image size. The Dell UP2414Q, which I haven’t reviewed, is available for under $900 often now (and sometimes much less) and also has the AdobeRGB gamut. It also has USB 3.0, multiple inputs, and a LUT you can access to calibrate the gamut. However given the issues I had with the 32” model waking up from sleep, I’m more hesitant about this. Dell has supposedly solved many of these problems but I haven’t tested it to see.

I can't take much away from the NEC performance. Out of the box it isn't as good as I expect from their professional line, but it calibrates to be almost perfect. Even without calibration it still offers the flexibility to move between sRGB, AdobeRGB, and other color gamuts quickly that other displays cannot. The display uniformity cannot be undersold either, as that alone makes it work for certain professionals. For a general user, I don't think it is going to be worth the extra price to get the UHD resolution in a 24" screen size. We're still waiting for hardware (DisplayPort 1.3 and HDMI 2.0) and software to catch up to UltraHD displays a lot of the time.

I think there are certain classes of users that can do well with a 24" UHD display: photo and video editors, financial professionals, and medical imaging users immediately come to mind. For general users after a single display, the LG 34UM95 remains a better pick I feel, or multiple 27" displays if your desktop has room for that. If you are in the group where the NEC EA244UHD fits your needs, then it performs very well and is a solid, if expensive, pick.