Sceptre X270W-1080p 27-inch Display Review

Posted 07/06/2010 at 12:30pm | by Michael Brown

Big and inexpensive—but not cheap

Price is one of the last elements we take into account when we evaluate a new product. We’d rather spend a little more get a lot more in terms of features and performance. But Sceptre’s X270W-1080p is selling online for as little as $300, and that earns it more than a highly qualified buy recommendation—especially if you’re a gamer with a fast videocard and you’re looking to move up from something a lot smaller.

Now don’t get the wrong idea: This is not a great monitor by any stretch of the imagination; it suffers from many of the typical shortcomings we’ve seen with other twisted-nematic panels. While testing using DisplayMate Multimedia with Test Photos, for example, we encountered color-tracking problems where blocks of what should have been the same color exhibited variations in tint depending on where they appeared on the monitor.

The X270W-1080p also had difficulty differentiating shades at the highest and lowest extremes of both the gray and color scales—the top and bottom four to six shades blended into contiguous blocks. It also did a very poor job rendering readable text in challenging combinations: dark blue fonts on a black background, white text on yellow or gray backgrounds, and green text on yellow were all completely unreadable.

On the other hand, it delivered a very good performance in terms of color uniformity; we detected just a slightly darker band around all four edges of the panel. The Sceptre perfomed well on the low-saturation color test, too, proving able to resolve the lowest saturation bar against a high-intensity white background without the color bars shifting shades. And unlike the vast majority of other inexpensive TN panels we’ve reviewed lately, there was almost no backlight leakage.

The stand, meanwhile, is limited to tilt (it’s not height-adjustable, doesn’t pivot, and doesn’t even rotate—unless you count moving the entire base). You can, however, easily remove the base and neck and mount the display to an articulated arm or hang it on the wall.

Sceptre's 27-inch X270W-1080p is an absolute win in terms of bang for the buck--even if it is a TN panel.

This isn’t a monitor you’d want to use for critical applications. In addition to the color fidelity issues, the monitor’s video inputs are limited to DVI, HDMI, and VGA (there’s no DisplayPort or component inputs). The controls are for the birds, too: the black-on-black buttons are impossible to see, and the on-screen display is completely unintuitive. We also don’t understand why Sceptre bothered to build such horrible speakers into the display—we can’t imagine anyone using them.

Sceptre includes HDMI, DVI, and VGA video ports, along with an 1/8-inch stereo jack to drive its horrid integrated speakers.

After playing several hours of Metro 2033 and Left4Dead 2, we found it hard to go back to Dell’s smaller UltraSharp U2410, even though that IPS panel is vastly superior on pretty much all counts. Once we started editing photos we’d shot over the July 4 holiday, however, we quickly remembered why the U2410 remains on our Best of the Best list. Sceptre’s X270W-1080p delivers a lot more value than you’d expect for the price, but that doesn’t make it a Kick Ass monitor.