NEC MultiSync EA244UHD 24-Inch 4K Monitor Review

While DisplayMate lays out a monitor's performance in black and white (and blue and green and red and...), we also take into consideration a subjective analysis. After all, you're not purchasing a monitor to view test patterns for hours on end. To see how the EA244UHD performs in the real world, we viewed a series of 4K clips and fired up a few games. Torturous, we know, but hey, you guys are worth every minute of our entertainment.
 

Subjective Tests HD Movie Playback and Gaming

Watching movies on a 4K panel is an experience all to its own, and one that's pretty hard to mess up unless the display suffers from serious visual quality flaws. The EA244UHD doesn't, and when we fired up different 4K video clips, both dark and lighter seems treated our eyeballs to an excellent visual experience, though again this was after we spent some time fine tuning the monitor. The payoff is definitely worth it.

NEC doesn't make any references to gaming performance in regards to this monitor that we can find, though there's a bit of room for boasting. While we did notice some motion blur, it was pretty minor most of the time, and sometimes not even noticeable at all. For the record, NEC lists the EA244UHD as having a 6ms response time.

As we're compelled to point out when reviewing 4K panels, if you plan to game at the monitor's native resolution, you'll need at least a high-end graphics card, if not two in SLI or CrossFire. Pushing pixels at a 3840x2160 resolution requires heavy lifting on the part of the GPU(s), so that's something to keep in mind if gaming is your main priority.

Like the majority of 4K panels on the market today, the EA244UHD tops out at 60Hz, and that's only achievable via DisplayPort. In order to run at 60Hz, the monitor performs a work-around of sorts by dividing the panel into two 1920x2160 halves. Using the DisplayPort and something called Multi-Stream Transport (MST) technology, the DisplayPort recombines these "multiple" panels into a single display with a 4K resolution and 60Hz refresh rate. The neat thing about the EA244UHD is that it's already preconfigured to run that way, so as long as you have supporting hardware, it will automatically run at 60Hz. And if you need to, you can always disable MST in the OSD controls.

NEC has done a great job here, as we never ran into any weird issues like we have with other monitors. It's not unusual for 4K displays to only display half the screen when coming out of sleep mode, if it wakes up at all. There are a number of issues that can drive a person mad, which can also result from non-VESA complaint DisplayPort cables (a list of known good cables is available here). Things are definitely improving, and whatever NEC has done on the backend and with regards to firmware, it seems to be working. AMD and NVIDIA have also improved detection algos in their drivers, which simplifies the setup process.