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Planar isn’t a familiar name to many UK customers, but the US company has been making displays since the 1980s and the Helium PCT2785 is one of its touchscreen monitors. This 27in monitor uses the same large, table-hogging chassis as the Iiyama Prolite T2735MSC, so you’ll need a fair amount of room on your desk if you want to take advantage of its sliding stand.
The Helium PCT2785 has 10-point touch support, and it was very responsive during general use. Once we’d calibrated the monitor for touch support using the Tablet PC settings in Windows’ Control Panel, multitouch gestures such as pinch-zooming and two-finger scrolling worked perfectly. We also had no problem swiping from the right-hand side of the monitor to display the Windows 8 Charms bar. We did have difficulty swiping from the left to switch between Windows 8 apps, though, and we couldn’t get this to work even after calibrating the monitor.
This isn’t a big problem overall, especially if you mainly use the desktop in Windows 8, but we weren’t particularly impressed in our technical image tests, either. The monitor uses an MVA panel. These panels typically aren’t known for their accurate colours but our colour calibrator showed the Helium PCT2785 was displaying just 82.1 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut. This is below average, even for an MVA panel, as we’d expect to see around 88 per cent from this type of panel.
The Helium PCT2785’s main areas of weakness were its green and cyan coverage, which had a tendency to sap images of their vibrancy and colour when placed alongside our reference monitor. Reds and blues, on the other hand, were very strong, but unfortunately we weren’t able to increase its accuracy once we’d calibrated the monitor.
This left our solid colour image tests looking less vivid than normal but, on the whole, they were still reasonably bright and rich. Whites were a little murky, even at maximum brightness, but this was partly due to the monitor’s low white levels, which we measured at just 172.11cd/m². By comparison, many 27in monitors we’ve tested have a white level of at least 220cd/m². Blacks were also quite grey despite our low black level reading of 0.16cd/m², and we detected a very slight amount of backlight bleeding down either side of the monitor as well.
The Helium PCT2785’s contrast levels, on the other hand, were outstanding. We measured a contrast ratio of 1,098:1. This may have been a long way off Planar’s claimed figure of 5,000:1, but all of our high contrast test images showed a very high level of detail. Our night shots were full of shadow detail, and its wide viewing angles meant we could see the screen clearly from almost any angle.
The monitor has a good range of inputs, too. They’re a little fiddly to access, but you’ll find VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort inputs alongside a two-port USB2 hub and separate headphone and microphone jacks.
It’s a shame the Planar Helium PCT2785’s image quality doesn’t match its superb contrast levels, but our biggest concern is the price. The Helium PCT2785 is more expensive than the superior Iiyama Prolite T2735MSC, though, and we think the Iiyama Prolite T2735MSC is by far the better buy.
