HP OMEN 27qs Monitor Review

The HP OMEN 27qs has a rather simple look with an all-black plastic body, and some OMEN branding and RGB lighting on the back. There's nothing that stands out about it, and you can use it in any type of environment.

The build quality is great. It features a matte plastic body that feels good, and there aren't any obvious issues. It's stable on the stand as it doesn't wobble much, which is great. However, like some other monitors, the pixels close to the bezels disappear when viewing the screen from the sides, but this isn't something you'll notice when sitting directly in front.

The ergonomics are good. It's easy to adjust the screen when you're sitting directly in front of it, but without swivel adjustment, it's hard to turn the screen to show it to someone next to you. Luckily, the height adjustment is good, and at its lowest setting, the bottom of the screen is 2.6" (6.5 cm) from the desk. The stand also features a clip for cable management.

There's a directional pad on the back right of the monitor to control the on-screen display and a power button to turn it On/Off.

• DisplayPort cable
• USB-A to USB-B cable
• Power cable
• User documentation

The HP OMEN 27qs has a low native contrast ratio that makes blacks look gray in the dark. While it has a local dimming feature, it only turns on in HDR, and it makes the entire image brighter, which is why the contrast ratio is worse with local dimming on.

This monitor has an edge-lit local dimming feature with eight zones, and it performs terribly. It only comes on in HDR, and you can't disable it, meaning it's always on when watching HDR content. Any bright object causes an entire zone to light up, resulting in distracting blooming, which is noticeable even with subtitles. That said, most content causes all the zones to turn on, so the issues with blooming are only noticeable in dark content. Unfortunately, the algorithm is slow to react to objects moving across the screen, which is also distracting. All in all, it's a bad implementation of local dimming that fails to improve the contrast, and because it's always on in HDR, it severely hinders its HDR performance.

The SDR brightness is great. It easily gets bright enough to fight glare and maintains its brightness consistently across different content, which is great. These results are from after calibration in the 'Gaming' Color Mode with the Brightness setting at its max.

The HP OMEN 27qs has good HDR brightness. While it gets bright with most content, small highlights don't pop against the rest of the image due to its low contrast and terrible local dimming feature. Also, the PQ EOTF doesn't follow the target curve well, as most dark scenes are too dark. Unfortunately, there aren't any settings in HDR besides Sharpness, and the local dimming is always on.

The horizontal viewing angle is good. The image remains consistent until you reach wide angles, so it's still good enough to share your screen with someone next to you.

The HP 27qs has an okay vertical viewing angle. The image gets darker from wide angles, so you'll notice this if you're standing up and looking down directly at the monitor; otherwise, it's fine.

The gray uniformity is great. Although the edges are darker than the rest of the screen, there's minimal dirty screen effect in the center, which is great.

The black uniformity is poor. In SDR, the entire screen is blue, and there's noticeable clouding and backlight bleed throughout. In HDR, where the local dimming feature is automatically enabled, and you can't turn it off, the uniformity is even worse because there's more blooming around bright objects.

The HP OMEN 27qs has excellent accuracy before calibration. While it doesn't have a dedicated sRGB mode, many of the Color Modes include an sRGB clamp. It locks colors well to the sRGB color space, and the white balance and gamma are both good but imperfect. That said, the color temperature is on the cold side, giving the image a blue tint. Only the 'Gaming' and 'Native' modes don't use the sRGB clamp, and the main advantage to using those is that they get brighter. The 'Gaming' mode is the more accurate of the two, but colors are oversaturated, as you can see here. The modes that include the sRGB clamp are:

• HP Enhance +
• Standard
• Warm
• Cool
• Cinema
• Night

The accuracy after calibration is excellent. While it isn't significantly better than before calibration in one of the sRGB modes, calibrating it at least makes the screen brighter, and the white balance, color temperature, and gamma are all improved.

The SDR color gamut is fantastic. It has perfect coverage of the common sRGB color space, and while it has great coverage of the Adobe RGB color space used in photo editing, it oversaturates reds and magentas and undersaturates greens and cyans.

The HP OMEN 27qs has an incredible HDR color volume. It displays most bright colors well but struggles with dark colors due to its low contrast.

The HDR color gamut is great. It has excellent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space used in most HDR content, and the tone mapping is excellent. However, it has worse coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, and tone mapping is a bit worse with it, too, particularly with white, cyan, and green.

The HDR color volume is excellent. While it displays colors at a wide range of luminance levels well, not all colors are very bright.

The reflection handling is good. The aggressive matte screen coating does a good job of reducing glare, even from strong light sources, and combined with its high peak brightness, you won't have issues using it in a bright room.

The text clarity is decent, but it isn't as good as other 27-inch, 1440p displays because there's color fringing when using Windows ClearType (top photo). If you find this distracting, it's better to disable it. These photos are in Windows 10, and while the fringing isn't as aggressive with Windows 11, it's still there as you can see with ClearType on and with ClearType off.

The gradient handling is incredible. There's some very minor banding in darker shades, but it's hard to see with most content.

This monitor doesn't support Display Stream Compression, so the max refresh rate is limited with 10-bit signals over DisplayPort. Its HDMI 2.0 bandwidth also limits the max refresh rate over HDMI.

The VRR support on the HP OMEN 27qs works across a wide refresh rate range as it supports Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) for the VRR to continue working at lower refresh rates, and it kicks in at 60Hz. However, G-SYNC doesn't work over HDMI.

The response time at the max refresh rate of 240Hz is fantastic. Motion looks smooth, and there's minimal blur or inverse ghosting with fast-moving objects. The recommended Response Time setting of 'Level 3' has a faster response time than 'Level 1' and 'Level 2' and has less overshoot than 'Level 4'. That said, motion looks fantastic with any of the settings up to and including 'Level 4', so you can choose whatever looks best for you.

The response time at 120Hz is excellent. Unlike at the max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive setting is 'Level 2' because there's more overshoot at the higher Response Time settings. Because of that, you may need to change the setting if the frame rate of your game drops or if you change games, but 'Level 2' is also a good set-and-forget mode as it performs consistently well across the entire refresh rate range.

The response time at 60Hz is great. It performs similarly to higher refresh rates, but there's more blur as some transitions are slow. The recommended overdrive setting is also 'Level 2' as higher settings have too much overshoot. Additionally, the monitor's LFC feature kicks in at 60Hz, doubling the refresh rate to 120Hz when you have VRR enabled, so you only get a true 60Hz refresh rate with VRR disabled.

Overdrive Setting	240Hz	144Hz	120Hz
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2
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5

The HP OMEN 27qs has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. You need to turn off Adaptive Sync to use the MPRT setting, which has five different options, with '5' being the most aggressive, but it also results in the lowest brightness. The feature does a decent job at reducing persistence blur but also has image duplication.

The backlight doesn't use pulse width modulation, which helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to flicker.

The HP OMEN 27qs has low input lag for a responsive feel, which doesn't significantly increase at high refresh rates.

The HP OMEN 27qs monitor can't take full advantage of the PS5 as it's limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth and doesn't support 4k signals. That said, there aren't any compatibility issues with the signals it supports.

The HP OMEN 27qs has limited compatibility with the Xbox Series X|S. It doesn't support HDMI 2.1 bandwidth to fully utilize the console. HDR doesn't work either, as the console only supports HDR with 4k signals, which the monitor doesn't accept.

This monitor works well with macOS when using a DisplayPort to USB-C cable. You can reach its max refresh rate, and both VRR and HDR work without issues. If you're using a MacBook, windows return to the original position when waking up the laptop from sleep, but not when you close the lid.

The HP OMEN 27qs has a few extra features, including RGB lighting on the back that you can control with different presets in the External Lighting page of the on-screen display. There are other settings, including:

• Audio Mode: There are different audio settings available, letting you customize the sound how you like.
• Crosshair: You can choose different virtual crosshairs available, giving you a competitive advantage as your game's anti-cheat tool won't detect it.
• Diagnostic Patterns: Displays full-screen images of different colors so you can see any uniformity issues or dead pixels more easily.
• Frame Rate: Displays the current frame rate from your source.
• Image Scaling: Lets you change the aspect ratio of the display.
• Multi-Monitor Align: Makes it easier to align the monitor next to another by displaying an overlay.