Cheap "DisplayHDR 1000" Scam? - Sceptre C345B-QUN168 Review

[Music] welcome back to hardware unboxed a couple of weeks ago gamers nexus forwarded me an email from one of their viewers titled hdr 1000 visa rating scam the email reads as follows i purchased a very interesting monitor the scepter c345 which is listed on the vaser website as being hdr 1000 rated i do not think there is another monitor out there with this certification under one thousand dollars what corners were cut to reach this insanely high rating does vaser brightness certification mean nothing i always love checking into suspected scams and dodgy advertising so i bought one of these monitors thanks to the support of our patreon and floatplane members and here it is the scepter c345b qun 168 which as you can see on their website and the box itself is proudly being advertised as a display hdr 1000 certified monitor and indeed if you go to the vasa website this very model is sitting in the list of displays certified in the 1000 tier for those of you that aren't familiar with the display hdr system it's vaso's method of certifying a monitor's hdr capabilities they have a list of test criteria and various tiers that each monitor can fall into ranging from display hdr 400 up to display hdr 1400 the higher the tier the better the hdr performance you can expect across all categories from brightness to contrast to colors so surely a monitor that receives the second highest rating would give you glorious true hdr capabilities right but what if i told you the scepter c345b has lackluster edge loot local dimming surely scepter are scamming the system and falsely advertising a high level of hdr right well we'll be exploring that later in this review what actually is the scepter c345b qun1 well it's a budget-friendly ultra-wide gaming monitor it has a 34-inch 3440x1440 va panel using an aggressive 1000 r curve similar to samsung's current lineup it supports up to a 165 hertz refresh rate and comes with adaptive sync technology and it does have a budget-friendly price tag of below 500 available through some retailers scepter are also calling this the nebula as you can see from the sticker on the front of the monitor the unit i bought is white which is something a bit different although the design itself is nothing special i think this color accentuates the average to large bezels more than you'd get from a black display and most of the build is constructed from a fairly basic plastic especially the stand pillar however the rear does feature a mostly clean design with an rgb led light strip running diagonally which looks reasonable and the stand legs at least are made of metal i did have one annoyance with this design and that's the location of the ports on the rear the color coding system is nice but the ports sticking straight out of the back means that some are easily obstructed by the stand especially the display port and some of those hdmi ports so getting your cable into those ports can be difficult and may require either lots of bending or right angled cables a different design would have worked better here on top of that septa's choice to use just hdmi 2.0 limits all three of the hdmi ports to just 100hz instead of the full 165hz this display really should include hdmi 2.1 the stand is height adjustable which is good to see and there are a couple of decent feature inclusions like an ambient light sensor which is not something i use but may be useful to others the osd is controlled through a directional toggle but it's a fairly slow interface to navigate and the range of settings is merely average the big question to answer about the scepter c345b is whether scepter are scanning buyers by claiming this is a display hdr 1000 monitor but they're not actually delivering that so let's explore its hdr performance first using our trusty checklist which explores the simple hardware capabilities of the display immediately there are red flags here that prevent the c345b from being a true hdr monitor while brightness does get very high over 800 nits sustained and peak scepter have chosen a panel that merely includes edge lit local dimming with just 24 zones split into what appears to be a 12 by 2 grid this is completely insufficient for good hdr performance with lcd panels you need at least 500 full array backlight zones if not more to deliver acceptable local contrast but not only that the c345b is also incapable of 10-bit processing without chroma subsampling limiting the panel to just 8-bit using the rgb pixel format not a huge deal but it's also a fail in that area the main issue with including just 24 edge lit dimming zones is poor blooming and haloing in most hdr content the whole point of hdr is displaying bright and dark elements on screen at the same time the c345b has no issue with bright stuff but if that bright stuff is in the center of the display both the top and bottom backlight zones need to switch on causing huge amounts of bloom that extend from the bright element to the edges of the display but even in the best case scenarios the local dimming just isn't that effective not fully dimming inactive zones and not having the control to only brighten the objects it needs to in many instances it simply looks terrible displaying hdr content relative to true hdr displays that have far less haloing previously i've described this sort of monitor as semi hdr as it can deliver a better than sdr experience at times but i feel this does a disservice to viewers as there are few times that's the case or hdr actually looks good on this display it's much more akin to a normal monitor simply being run at high brightness than it is to a proper hdr display so in my opinion it's much closer to fake hdr than true hdr let's dive into some numbers one thing the nebula c345b does reasonably well is achieve a high level of brightness above a typical sdr monitor for full screen sustained white windows it's impressive at 850 nits however it's less impressive for flash brightness not changing at all between sustained and peak in our testing again for small window brightness the c345b is decent without being amazing again sitting around the 850 mark this is below the level required of the display hdr 1000 tier where you'd expect at least 1 000 nits in one of the three brightness tests we've shown as it stands this level of performance is below all the other 1000 tier monitors i've tested such as the aorus fv43u and predator x35 and across all window sizes the maximum i got the monitor to hit was consistently about 850 nits noting this was tested in the built-in hdr 1000 mode in the osd so is the c345b falsely advertising 1000 capabilities well not quite in the vaser display hdr test tool i was able to hit over 1000 nits in some of the test patterns however we used calman to test hdr which produces slightly different patterns this monitor is an oddity in that i was only able to achieve one thousandths or greater in the display hdr tool at no point during our regular testing or in real world content samples did i observe 1 000 it's in practice now 850 nits is still very reasonable but typically if a monitor only achieves stated performance in one specific test pattern it's a bit dodgy and deceptive as mentioned earlier the c345b is not very good at utilizing its dimming functionality the brightness floor is relatively high displaying a full black window the backlight doesn't switch off in these instances so flash versus black contrast is low at just over thirteen thousand to one this is more in the performance class of display hdr 600 monitors and below the requirements for proper hdr it's a similar story in our best case single frame contrast test which has a dark and bright area on screen at the same time but just a bit far apart local dimming does work it just doesn't get very dim limiting the c345b's performance to 12 400 to 1 below even the fv43u and of course well below proper hdr displays with full array local dimming that can easily hit over 100 000 to 1 in this test the performance on offer heat is in line with your typical basic edge lit dimmed hdr display and it's sure of the requirements for proper hdr owing to high native contrast from its va panel the c345b doesn't fare too badly in our worst case tests however performance in both of these charts is no better than native performance so local dimming is effectively doing nothing the low brightness checkerboard result is also poor indicating the panel doesn't manage its backlight well for darker scenes and actually ends up with worse than native contrast this display also has poor hdr accuracy across the eotf range the c345b is consistently too dim except for in the low luminance range where it's not dim enough at times the monitor can be half as bright as it should be despite being capable of over 800 nits peak this again suggests poor hdr tuning and poor backlight control on top of this you have to manually enable the hdr mode in the osd every time you switch to the hdr mode which is annoying as most other monitors will automatically switch to the hdr mode for you while there are some areas that are decent overall the hdr performance is poor and the hardware itself is only edge lit dimming capable so this begs the question of how this display could be display hdr 1000 certified are there certain brightness and contrast requirements to uphold if we dive into the display hdr performance tiers the 1000t has certain requirements at least 1 000 nits in some peak brightness tests and at least 600 nits of sustained brightness for contrast there are two areas the black level dual corner box test where we need to see seven fifteen it's white and .05 and it's black for a contrast ratio of at least fifteen thousand to one and up to fourteen stops of dynamic range so just over sixteen thousand to one in the checkerboard test the first issue here is simply that these requirements are too low and easy to pass but ignoring that for a second aren't these figures pointing to the c345b falsely advertising display hdr 1000 as we didn't hit 15 000 1 contrast in any test let alone the checkerboard test where contrast was below 5000 to 1. surely this is a slam dunk result pointing to a septa scan not so fast because actually the c345b passes display hgl1000 certification based on my independent testing how is that possible it's down to the display hdr test methodology being absolute garbage let's dive into the display hdr test guidelines document for the checkerboard test the one where this display is supposed to achieve a contrast ratio in excess of sixteen thousand to one but in my testing can't even hit five thousand to one now the way you might think you should test a checkerboard pattern is you display the checkerboard you measure the white squares you measure the black squares and then you compare the two figures to create a contrast ratio this is how i measure it because it's the most representative of real world hdr content where you might have bright and dark areas on the screen at the same time in various on-screen positions but this is not how vaser measures the checkerboard test instead they measure the white level using a totally different pattern the 10 center patch then they switch to the checkerboard test and measure only the black areas when the checkerboard white level is at either 50 or 5 nits depending on the test this is such a dumb test method because it's not measuring local contrast it's not measuring whether the monitor can display bright and dark at the same time it's measuring two different frames and it gives manufacturers an easy out to have high checkerboard contrast without any local doing hardware so let's see how septa passes this test in the 10 center patch test from their test tool they hit over 1 000 nits but let's just say it's a thousand it's for simplicity's sake this establishes our white level then we switch to the checkerboard test and now the display no longer has to show 1 000 nits in the white squares instead we lower the brightness all the way down to 5 nits now we measure black it comes in at 0.054 knits we compare that to the white level captured earlier and we end up with a contrast of 18 500 to 1. convert that to stop so we get 14.2 stops higher than the required 14 stops so it passes but notice there was no requirement to show 1 000 nits and 0.05 nits at the same time we hit 1 nits we changed the test hit 0.05 nits that's what vaso called the active dimming checkerboard test it's pretty laughable because the only thing a monitor manufacturer needs to do to pass this requirement is be able to change the entire backlight level all at once crank up that brightness record your white level turn the brightness way down record the black level boom high contrast display supposedly you don't need local dimming at all to achieve a good result here theoretically a 1000 display with no local dimming will pass provided it can turn the backlight brightness down far enough in the checkerboard test this is absolutely not how i would design a checkerboard test to measure hdr unless the intention was to make it as easy for display makers to pass as possible i really don't think this test methodology is founded in how actual hdr content is presented on hdr displays calling this test method a checkerboard test is pretty misleading in my opinion given half of it isn't even tested in the checkerboard test pattern there is an actual local contrast test though the dual corner box test but it's also laughably easy to pass all the monitor needs is to be able to dim the center of the display sufficiently while bright areas are present at either corner edge lit local dimming with less than 10 zones generally have no trouble meeting the requirements and indeed with the c345b using the exact vaser test method i measured a contrast ratio over 25 000 to 1 well above the display hdr 1000 requirements this is another test where performance using the display hdr test tool was unusually good compared to real-world testing with local dimming performing much better than average but these are the specified tests which are used for certification so this is the conclusion on whether the c345b is an hdr 1000 scam and whether it's falsely advertising display hdr 1000 it's not because it passes the display hdr 1000 test criteria using vase's methodology and test software however the display hdr test methodology is rubbish and insufficient for measuring true hdr performance even at the 1000 tier the test criteria effectively does not require full array local dimming or high zone dimming of any kind to pass at any tier and crappy edge lit panels that can get very bright will suffice display hdr ratings will not tell you if the display you're buying is capable of high contrast ratios and frankly it shouldn't be trusted or used for evaluating hdr monitor purchases at all because of this for display hdr to be useful the requirements would need to be significantly tightened let's move on from hdr and look at the rest of the c345p for response performance there are some overdrive settings but they cannot be changed when adaptive sync is enabled so this is the performance you get at 165 hurts the monitor well it isn't too bad with an average response time of 6.76 milliseconds and only a minor amount of overshoot you can spot some dark level smearing but it's limited to just a handful of transitions and overall cumulative deviation is decent for a va monitor though not quite at the level of ips monitors or samsung's high-end odyssey vas however the major issue with this display's motion performance is a significant reduction in speed at lower refresh rates when tested in the adaptive sync mode at 144hz though the cutoff appears to be 146 hertz specifically the c345b is twice as slow and issues like dark level smearing are much more pronounced and this continues to be the case right the way down to 60 hertz with small changes in response times and overshoot levels the difference between 165 and lower refresh rates is quite noticeable in practice with lower clarity and longer blur trails at those lower refreshes so it isn't ideal for a variable refresh rate monitor while the c345b does only have a single overdrive mode accessible when adaptivesync is enabled the performance here isn't good enough for me to describe it as a single overdrive mode experience scepter really should be doing a better job of optimization and unlocking overdrive controls when variable refresh is enabled would give users greater control over their experience compared to other monitors the c345b is acceptable at 165hz coming close to the performance of the gigabyte m34wq on average and outperforming other va monitors such as the g34wqc and autocg5 performance at the highest refresh rate is decently well optimized and i feel septa are getting as much out of this panel as they possibly can unfortunately on average across the refresh range these optimizations don't apply at all refresh rates so the average performance we see is much more in line with a typical va based budget ultrawide that we've seen for the last few years it's not the worst among that sort of monitor but it fails to stand out from the pack here and overall motion performance is pretty mediocre for a display in 2022 this plays out as expected in average cumulative deviation where the septa display falls in the middle of the range of typical va ultrawides and somewhat behind that of an ips alternative like gigabytes m34wq but the main issue is dark level smearing so even though ips versions on average may not be outstandingly better ips monitors have far less dark smearing compared to a va display like the c345b so this should be a key consideration in what you purchase at 120hz the c345b is rather slow though again this isn't unusual for this sort of monitor it's just the reality of buying a budget va panel these days at 60hz it's not as bad and a respectable level of performance can be salvaged but again it's not a groundbreaking level of performance we've seen this sort of thing before input latency is typical hovering around the one millisecond mark in terms of processing delay and overall latency is nothing special given the mid-range refresh rate and average to slow response times if you're really concerned about latency such as when playing competitive shooters i'd probably try and get a different format of monitor with a higher refresh rate if possible power consumption is pretty good coming in a little lower than its competitors though we're only talking about a few watts difference despite only being advertised as an srgb monitor with 99 coverage the septa c345b is actually a wide gamut monitor supporting 93 dc ip3 coverage it doesn't have meaningful coverage of adobe rgb but 93 p3 is definitely wider than srgb so it's unusual not to see that advertised especially given the claims around hdr total rec 2020 coverage clocks in at 72 which is middle of the pack among gaming monitors of today factory calibration is mediocre with a wonky result for cct and gamma leading to high delta ease for greyscale it also comes without an srgb gamut clamp by default so there's moderate over saturation when viewing regular sdr content and average delta e performance when compared to other displays we're largely looking at mid-tier factory calibration results it could have been worse but i'd have liked to see a bit of an improvement the real stinger here is the lack of an srgb mode so there is no way to clamp the wide color gamut down to the levels required for most sdr content this severely limits the amount of tweaking you can do in the osd to improve accuracy sure you can tweak a few aspects to grayscale here and there but fundamentally the color primaries cannot be adjusted so the only way to significantly improve performance is through a full calibration we used portrait displays calman for this results for srgb are very good and certainly this display is a great candidate for srgb use but for p3 i describe this as more of a content consumption display than a content creation display as the top end of the p3 gamut is cut off peak brightness in the sdr mode is exceptional at nearly 800 nits receptor providing most of the brightness range for use outside of hdr content i don't think many buyers will actually require 800 nits but you are able to turn brightness down unfortunately the brightness range is limited the lowest you can get is 115 nits which for those that like very low brightness levels may not be dim enough the native contrast ratio achieved with this panel is exceptionally good and like brightness this is a real strength of the panel i recorded a contrast ratio just over 5700 to 1 after calibration which is far higher than most other monitors and black levels as a result are very good this would have made for an excellent hdr monitor if the local dimming capabilities were decent but unfortunately the edgelit system is not very good as previously discussed and finally just a quick look at uniformity which is standard for an ultra wide monitor the outer edges aren't quite as consistent as the center section but this isn't hugely noticeable during usage so i'd describe this as fine lastly it's time for the hub essentials checklist this is a series of checks to assess a monitor for key feature inclusions and misleading advertising measuring the listed specs and features compared to our testing results this is in response to the growing trend of misleading advertising and dodgy specifications the scepter c345b scores poorly in the checklist on a number of fronts scepter falsely advertises the bezel size on their website and in marketing materials scepter shows the display panel extending all the way to the white bezel border but in reality there is a second black bezel inside this white border which is not depicted so the marketing materials exaggerate the thinness of the bezels scepter also failed to include hdmi 2.1 to provide enough bandwidth for the display's maximum refresh rate in the color section the only points deducted after not including an srgb mode scepter doesn't advertise factory calibration which is the correct decision and other aspects are actually quite significantly understated such as brightness and contrast motion performance is a typical checklist result with misleading claims made about response times a lack of adjustable overdrive and a poor backlight strobing mode hdr performance sees some big penalties come into play while scepter advertisers display hdr 1000 certification and this is technically correct based on my testing i don't think the display lives up to what most people would class as a display hdr 1000 product and many test results are not replicable in real world content as such i'm labeling it as a fakish hdr monitor it also fails to reach the advertised 1000 nits in most real world content and the local dimming functionality is bad insufficient for hdr i also have to criticize septo for failing some of the defect checks we've implemented the c345b exhibits both flickering and pixel inversion in several tests flickering can be experienced around the 50 to 60hz range in some variable refresh games and scan lines are triggered in pixel inversion test patterns this suggests a poor panel quality and to make matters worse these elements can't be fixed as firmware upgrades and not supported as far as i'm aware i'd be hesitant to recommend the monitor on these elements alone the scepter c345b qun168 is a bad monitor and i wouldn't recommend it while it's not technically a scam and it doesn't falsely advertise display hdr 1000 certification the whole situation leaves a foul taste in my mouth as really it's the display hdr metrics that are letting consumers down here the vaser test methodology that allows a product like the c345b to pass certification is absolute garbage and it ends up allowing scepter to advertise a cheap budget monitor at the second highest hdr tier available i've no doubt that some buyers will be fooled into thinking this monitor's hdr capabilities are much better than they actually are purely based on the display hdr 1000 sticker now to be fair there are some areas of performance where the c345p exceeds regular sdr capabilities and scepter has implemented high brightness and two-row edge lit local dimming but the local dimming algorithm is bad brightness tracking is poor leaving content too dim zones aren't aggressive enough at switching off and actually hitting 1000 nits in real world content outside of very specific laser test patterns is virtually impossible this leads to a crap hdr experience there's too much blooming and not enough shadow detail the hardware simply isn't good enough i don't think consumers should trust the display hdr mark if this sort of monitor is able to scrape into high tier certification on a few technicalities the fallback position when a monitor sucks at hdr is to treat it as just an sdr monitor and for the price i don't think that position is out of place the c345b costs as little as 450 us after all but there are still numerous issues even with sdr performance like poor response times below 144 hertz dark level smearing average factory calibration with no srgb mode locked overdrive settings and more compounding this list of faults are observable flickering and scanline issues which are a complete deal breaker for me and lead to the display failing 17 out of 36 checklist items which is too many for my liking the only significant strengths here are very high levels of brightness and an excellent native contrast ratio i also didn't mind the performance at 165hz specifically for a va panel but i don't think these positives outweigh the negatives so regardless of price i can't see myself recommending this monitor instead i'd point bias to alternatives like the gigabyte g34 wqc and the gigabyte as well m34wq which are either cheaper or better sometimes both there are also several other very similar v8 ultrawides that improve upon this display at times whether that's better response times or feature additions like an srgb mode so it's well worth exploring all the options available to you when buying this sort of va ultrawide anyway that's it for this review big thank you to our patreon and floatplane members who support us directly and allow us to independently test monitors like this we've never been sent a septa monitor before i don't think they technically sell monitors in australia so we imported this one from the us it cost us a little bit of money to get that done but we do appreciate the support of our patrons and floatplane members who allow us to buy stuff like this for testing if you're interested in supporting us links to those are in the description below so thanks for watching and i'll catch you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 75,016

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: _ohhXyPGzWs

Length: 26min 29sec (1589 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 01 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Ar0ndight]

That HDR checklist is a great idea. A much better indicator of HDR performance than the nebulous VESA certification

[u/c0rzaaa]

shame on vesa

[u/bubblesort33]

Starting to seem like all these certification organisation like HDMI, and VESA just exist to get people to feel a falls sense of security and consumer protection.

[u/bizude]

I've used the 16:9 version of this monitor.

As someone who hasn't used a "good" HDR monitor before, I thought the HDR in gaming was a nice upgrade over a normal monitor - but the blooming in dark scenes was very annoying.

What really annoyed me though was brightness flickering in some desktop apps (like Cinebench) with HDR enabled on the desktop

[u/psychosikh]

Guess we have to wait for the QD-OLED monitors for true HDR1000 performance.

[u/akarypid]

At 5:53 a graph "Full Screen Sustained Brightness" is shown.

Is this the "maxed out brightness" with a regular SDR signal? So, can this monitor sustain 850nits continuously when showing a regular non-HDR signal if you max out its brighness?

[u/No_Okra8902]

Despite the false advertising, this monitor is great compared to other 34” ultrawides at this price range