Eizo Foris FG2421 review

The Eizo Foris FG2421 has a couple of firsts to its name. It’s the first monitor with a VA panel to support a 120Hz refresh rate, and it has a special Turbo 240 mode that manipulates the backlight in order to give the illusion of 240Hz, in order to cut down on motion blur.

We tested the monitor side by side with a 120Hz Iiyama ProLite XB2779QS screen, and a powerful PC capable of producing high frame rates. Running on this PC, Dirt Showdown regularly hits over 100fps, so is a good test to see if a monitor can keep up. On both screens, the racing action was beautifully smooth with none of the tearing that we associate with a graphics card producing more frames than a monitor can display.

However, even with the Turbo 240 mode enabled, we didn’t find that there was a significant difference between the two screens in terms of smoothness and motion blur. Motion blur is something that you can only really measure subjectively, and there are some people online who claim Turbo 240 reduced motion blur for them when gaming, but we didn’t think the mode offered any significant advantages over a 120Hz panel’s already-high refresh rate.

Even if you don’t have a graphics card that’ll produce incredibly high frame rates, the FG2421 is still a good gaming monitor, but you will need to calibrate the monitor to get the best out of it. The FG2421 uses a VA panel, and VA panels typically display less accurate colours than other types of panel technology, but much deeper blacks.

As you’d expect from a high-end monitor, the FG2421 has a good range of connection ports, with DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort inputs, a 2-port USB2 hub and separate headphone and microphone jacks.

When calibrating the display, we used one of three customisable User modes. Initially, we were disappointed with the monitor’s colour accuracy, as our colour calibrator showed it was displaying just 83.2 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is below average, even for a VA panel, and its colour coverage was short in all the major primary colour groups apart from yellow and cyan.

This meant images didn’t look as rich or vibrant as other monitors we’ve seen, but we were able to increase its colour accuracy to a much more respectable 94.3 per cent after calibration. This is one of the highest scores we’ve seen for a VA panel, and it brought a lot of depth to our subjective image tests.

Whites were a little grey, but our solid reds, greens and blues had plenty of punch. The monitor’s black levels were particularly impressive as our solid blacks were incredibly deep and inky across the screen, which reflected our near-perfect black level reading of 0.08cd/m².

We measured a huge contrast ratio of 5,138:1, and could see a very high level of detail in all of our test photos. Our night photos in particular looked even better on the FG2421 than our reference monitor, so you shouldn’t have any trouble spotting finer detail in darker images and games.

You can also choose from four other colour modes in addition to the three user-customisable modes mentioned earlier. These include two first-person shooter (FPS) modes, a real-time strategy (RTS) mode and a web mode. These modes don’t let you customise individual colour values, but you can still alter the brightness, black level, contrast, colour temperature and gamma levels with the FG2421’s menu buttons. Fortunately, colours were more accurate in these modes than our un-calibrated User profile, and we recorded colour gamut coverage of 92.5 per cent for both the Web and FPS 1 modes, which is much more in line with what we’d normally expect to see from a VA panel.

For everyday use, we’d recommend using Web mode, as we think it produced the richest and brightest colours. The Turbo 240 feature isn’t available in this mode, though, so you’ll have to switch to one of the User or gaming modes to take advantage of the monitor’s high refresh rate. We found the RTS and FPS 1 modes were great for illuminating darkly lit areas in games because of their high contrast levels, but both made the overall picture quality look a little too harsh for our liking.

The Eizo Foris FG2421 is certainly an impressive gaming monitor, but you’ll need a good graphics card that can regularly hit 120fps to take full advantage of its high refresh rate. It’ll be an enticing prospect for serious PC gamers, but if your budget doesn’t stretch that far, the 120Hz BenQ XL2420T is much cheaper and has more inputs.