5 of the Best Computer Monitors in 2024

Brightness is the biggest determining factor for how vivid images appear and how well a monitor is going to deal with the environment it’s placed in. Brightly lit offices will make it harder to see the screen if the brightness is too low, which degrades the image quality of anything on the screen.

In most situations, we recommend a brightness of at least 200 nits, though higher is always better, as it allows the monitor to be placed in progressively brighter rooms and offices without issue. That said, 200 nits are enough to work in standard lighting conditions so that images stay vivid.

Contrast ratio is responsible for making images appear “dynamic” and “dramatic.” By having a good contrast ratio, a monitor is able to recreate dramatic differences between light and dark spots in scenes, images, and games accurately.

At a minimum, we recommend a contrast ratio of 1000:1, as this will do a good enough job of allowing for detail in dark scenes and images. If the contrast ratio gets too low, the picture quality suffers, and the monitor performs worse across the board, no matter the lighting condition. By getting a monitor with a sufficiently high contrast ratio, you can ensure the picture quality doesn’t suffer, and dramatic scenes with stark shifts in lighting, whether they be in games or videos, are created as accurately as possible.

Color gamut is responsible for making a monitor produce accurate colors when displaying a variety of content. The DCI P3 xy gamut is considered a “standard” gamut of sorts and is used to help color-grade films. Most HDR content will use this gamut at the very least (though other gamut exist) and it’s a commonly used gamut for films.

When it comes to a computer monitor, having a panel that covers at least 90% of the DCI P3 gamut means it’ll output accurate colors when watching HDR content and movies that use the gamut. If a monitor doesn’t cover enough of the gamut, it causes color inaccuracies and shifts the image quality. If you care about maintaining accuracy in the movies you watch so they look the way they were intended, this gamut needs to be properly covered.

Since color gamut comes in a variety of different types, there’s bound to be some confusion as to which is meant for what. sRGB is an extremely common gamut that is used for the vast majority of web content, including how YouTube videos display, and is the primary gamut used for video games.

If you’re looking for accurate colors while web browsing, watching videos, or playing games, you’re going to want coverage of at least 90%. Higher is always better and hitting 100% means that if you correctly calibrate your monitor, you should be seeing content exactly as it was intended. Higher than 100% means that more than just the standard gamut has been covered, which can create more saturated and vivid colors. Coming in under 100% means the colors are less accurate, though this doesn’t become a major issue until you start to fall under 90%.

As the name might imply, the Adobe RGB gamut is mostly focused on photo printing and was developed by Adobe themselves in order to give users the ability to know how a photo would look if it was printed using standard CMYK printers.

If you’re printing a lot of photos and editing them in most photo programs, this is a commonly used color gamut. By having it be at least 90% covered and properly calibrated, your monitor is able to show you how a photo you’re editing will look when it’s printed out. If the coverage of this gamut isn’t high enough, you’ll suffer the opposite and may end up wasting a lot of ink on photos that look great on your screen but seem to come out completely off when you print them.

Input lag is more of a concern when it comes to gaming, but if you plan on using a monitor for a bit of gaming when you aren’t focused on productivity, editing, or other tasks, lower values help improve responsiveness. High input lag means your actions take longer to register on the monitor, effectively introducing an artificial delay to your reactions.

It’s for this reason that we generally recommend an input lag under 15 ms. This ensures the delay that’s introduced has minimal impact on your reactions to what’s happening on screen. It’s important to note that a high input lag won’t have any real effect on anything that isn’t gaming, so it can be safely ignored if you don’t plan on gaming on your monitor.

Response time measures how long it takes pixels to change from one color to another, often gray to gray. Low response times mean the monitor is able to keep up with constant shifts in colors and helps prevent motion blur from being introduced to whatever you’re watching.

We generally recommend a response time that is 13 ms or less, as this will keep motion blur to a minimum, but if you don’t watch a lot of very high-intensity videos or play fast-paced games, response time isn’t going to matter much. It’s important to note that monitors will often advertise a 1ms or 2ms or 5ms response time, to name a few, but response time tests measure full color to color shifts, as well as overshoots, which produces different times than what the monitor often claims on the box. This is why response time is a listed spec, but also a testable criterion.

When using a monitor in any kind of room outside of one that’s pitch black, the screen is going to reflect light. As the light becomes strong, you’re likely to see more light and more glare reflect off it, but depending on the coating and screen type, this can be mitigated. Good screen coatings will keep ambient light and direct light managed by reducing the impact they have on the screen. Bad reflection handling means even weak light sources will create glare that makes it hard to use the monitor.

That’s why we recommend your monitor reflect no more than 6% of the total light shining on it. This keeps glare in check, prevents image quality from being ruined, and allows you to actually see what you’re working on when using your monitor. Lower is always better, but 6% is enough to work without issue.

If you’ve ever crowded around a single monitor or used a multi-monitor setup, you might have noticed that sometimes, the image quality and colors on the monitor look odd or off. The point behind viewing angle testing is to identify how soon this happens, so you know how good a monitor is at being used for similar setups and situations. Monitors with great viewing angles can be looked at from broader angles than monitors with poor angles without worrying about a loss of color quality.

That’s why we generally recommend a viewing angle greater than 35. This gives you a little flexibility with how you position a monitor so it’s comfortable to use, and also means that you’ll be able to use it in a multi-monitor setup or at a standing desk without worry. Higher viewing angles are always better, of course, but generally speaking, the highest available viewing angles come from expensive OLED panels.