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 good. 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 great. 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. 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 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 good. While it displays colors at a wide range of luminance levels well, not all colors are very bright.

The text clarity is good. Enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) helps improve the clarity. These photos are in Windows 10, and you can see them with Windows 11 with ClearType on and with ClearType off.

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 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 HP OMEN 27qs has very good motion handling across its entire refresh rate range with VRR enabled. The 'Level 3' has consistently the best performance, but it starts to introduce inverse ghosting at lower refresh rates, and it doesn't have the lowest CAD at the max refresh rate. Other settings like 'Level 5' have such high CAD that it passes the limits for our chart, as you can see here.

The refresh rate compliance is good. Its response time isn't fast enough to keep up with high frame rates, which is expected for an LCD monitor, but it's much better at lower refresh rates. Although the 'Level 3' overdrive setting has the consistently best compliance across its entire refresh rate range, 'Level 4' is better for high frame rates, and 'Level 2' is better for low frame rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate is great. Motion looks sharp with the recommended overdrive of 'Level 4'. It has the fastest total response time, and while it has a bit more overshoot than 'Level 3', it isn't a significant difference.

The CAD at 120Hz is good. It's similar to its max refresh rate, but there's more inverse ghosting. The 'Level 3' overdrive setting has the lowest CAD, but if its overshoot bothers you, you can use 'Level 2' instead. However, using that comes at the cost of added motion blur because it has a slightly higher CAD.

The CAD at 60Hz is good. While there's noticeable blur, there isn't too much smearing or inverse ghosting. Unlike at 120Hz, the recommended overdrive is 'Level 2' because the higher settings have too much overshoot. This can be disappointing if you need to change games that have a lower frame rate.

Overdrive Setting	240Hz	144Hz	120Hz
1
3
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 HP OMEN 27qs doesn't have too much VRR flicker with changing frame rates. Although it's more noticeable in dark scenes than in the video, it isn't too distracting, and doesn't happen with all content.

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.

As the monitor doesn't support 4k signals and the console only supports HDR in 4k, you can't enable HDR at all on the monitor.

This monitor is limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, but if you want something with HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, look into the LG 27GR83Q-B.

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.