Testing a display is two parts science, one part art. It's difficult to measure the performance of a display the same way Maximum PC evaluates other products. There is no benchmark that we can just fire up and then report a score from. Nor can we even test displays in their out-of-box condition. A fair amount of tweaking and visual analysis is necessary to ensure fair display benchmarking. And at the end of the day, determining which monitor reigns supreme is a mix of qualitative testing and the editor's expertise.
Read on to see exactly how we test monitors!