BenQ Zowie XL2566K 24.5 Fast TN in 360Hz Gaming Monitor, Motion Clarity DyAc⁺, 1080p, XL Setting to Share, Custom Quick Menu, S Switch, Shield, Smaller Base, Adjustable Height & Tilt, Black

Product Information

This is certainly a compromise to achieve the speed and functionality desired by competitive gamers. The foot of the stand is also nice and small, giving you flexibly in positioning of your screen and peripherals for gaming.

Let's delve into the crucial aspect: motion performance. Regarding response time performance and overdrive settings, the Zowie XL2566K features three built-in presets along with an adjustable slider for full user customization of overdrive. This is a great feature to have, even if not essential, as the included modes are quite satisfactory. The only mode we would advise against using, except possibly for low refresh rate gaming, is the Off mode. I sometimes feel headaches or eyes soreness while using the monitor. What can be adjusted to alleviate the discomfort if I feel unwell?XL2566K is the flagship model that offers competitive gamers optimized smoothness and fast response, as well as its many customizable features that will help amateurs and pros alike to perform to the best of their best abilities. With the exclusive DyAc?™ technology on top of 360Hz refresh rate on a TN panel, XL2566K provides an overall clearer motion clarity than the market's offerings in its class.

For new K series monitors, the way to save settings via the S Switch has been changed. If Gamer1 is selected, the customized display setting is only saved in the monitor. Learn more We will talk about the Corsair 240Hz OLED in a moment that’s included in the pursuit camera photos – park that for now! Any custom resolution/Hz setting may damage your monitor due to out of the operation range different from what the monitor has been designed for, and it may make your monitor out of warranty accordingly. Learn more The DyAc+ mode worked very well in practice at further enhancing the visual experience for gaming and reducing blur. Whether or not a competitive or pro gamer would normally play with something like this enabled is debatable, but it’s there as an option for those who like it or who want to experiment.

Games

Firstly the resolution is of course low by modern standards at only 1920 x 1080. This is well established and appropriate for a screen of this size (24.5″) but leaves you with a much smaller area to work with than common 1440p, 4K or similar resolutions. It also leaves you with a larger text size than 27″ 1440p or other common screen sizes like 34″UW 1440p for instance. The text size is perfectly adequate for a smaller screen size like this, but you lose a bit of the sharpness and pixel density if you’re used to those other options. Anything higher on a screen this small would be impractical without introducing the need for software scaling, so 1080p is fine.

Can I share my settings with a friend whose monitor is not on the list of XL Setting to Share compatible monitors? Today we're testing a product that we've wanted to get our hands on for some time now: the BenQ Zowie XL2566K. We've spent a considerable amount of time over the past six months evaluating some of the fastest monitors on the market, be it the latest 240Hz OLEDs or the 1440p 360Hz IPS LCD that debuted last year. These prices are all very high compared to regular 24-inch gaming monitors. However, the premium reflects the Zowie’s skunkworks nature with its high development costs and super-niche market size. Other 360Hz gaming monitors use IPS technology and still cost more, but they tend to be much larger and have more luxury features that suit gaming and multimedia immersion.This is a TN Film panel and absolutely designed for gamers, so it’s unlikely you’d want to be doing any colour critical work on it anyway, but we would have liked to have seen a ~100% sRGB gamut in this day and age on any screen. Keep in mind also that this screen would give you no support for wider colour gamut content which is increasingly common nowadays (including HDR content) so you’re limited to a more traditional ~sRGB standard gamut here. That also means that you cannot work with wider colour spaces like Adobe RGB (photography) or DCI-P3 (HDR content creation) if you wanted to, although as we say this isn’t a screen aimed at those uses at all. The XL2566K builds on what has made its predecessors great, and that can be taken quite literally in some cases. The exterior and design is the exact same as that of the XL2546K, but I think that that’s a plus. ‘Never change a winning team,’ they say, and if you ask me the modern XL line of monitors have a design that’s pretty hard to beat. I’ll speak more about the build quality and design in the next section, but I love the fact that they haven’t made any unnecessary changes here. This is normal behavior, much like making major changes to the graphics settings of a game. When FreeSync Premium is enabled or disabled with a game running, some games will be affected because graphics settings need to be reset for the change to take effect. Learn more As I said earlier, the XL2566K looks exactly the same as its predecessor, the XL2546K. For me, that’s a huge plus, as I’m of the opinion that ZOWIE pretty much nailed it on that front. One thing that I love about the monitor is that it has such a small footprint. The panel itself isn’t the thinnest or sleekest, but the stand has a very small footprint, especially when compared to some other gaming-focused monitors out there. I seriously don’t get the need for monitor stands with the wingspan of a bald eagle; it looks impressive, but it’s infuriating how much space some monitors take up on your desk.