Display Enlightment by NCX

The HP 25f is preset to the Neutral mode in the Color Control menu, which has locked color controls which prevent one from being able to edit the Red, Green and Blue color controls.  To activate Free-Sync with compatible devices (compatible graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia and the Xbox One X) the 24 Envy (tested in 2017) and 25f both need to be set to the Free-Sync mode to activate Free-Sync; the setting is located in the Viewing Modes Sub menu in the Color Control menu.  The HP 25f suffers from a light purple tint in the Neutral mode or out-of-the-box, and suffers from a light preset green tint when set to the Free-Sync mode, and unlike the HP 27CW, 25 & 27XW, and 25er and 25es I tested in 2015 and 2016, the HP 25f does not need to have its contrast reduced from 80 to 75 to get rid of a gross green tint present when viewing white and grey in the Lagom White Saturation Test

The Free-Sync mode offers fairly accurate colors for a budget display, but editing the color controls makes the 24 envy and 25f switch to the Custom Color mode which de-activates Free-Sync.  The 25er and 25es suffered from less of a preset green dominance, provided better gamma tracking (target=HDTV/REC 709 linear 2.2 standard) while the 24 Envy provided nearly complete HDTV/REC 709 and sRGB color space coverage, but had slightly too high gamma (2.42 average) which causes slight black crush or color and shade darkening.  Aside from the contrast issue mentioned the HP 25er and 25es provide significantly better preset color accuracy than the 25f, which like the er and es, can not fully cover the HDTV/REC 709 or sRGB color space since they under-saturate some blue and green shades, and some over-saturate greens, reds and yellows.  The 24 Envy also can not fully cover the HDTV/REC 709 and sRGB color space, but barely under-saturates color, and does not over-saturate colors.






Overall the 25f  has good but obviously flawed (versus a calibrated monitor) preset color accuracy, however this is to be expected for a budget 1080p IPS/PLS, and HP added AMD Free-Sync and 75hz support as well as fixed the preset contrast issue the previous two generations (CW & XW monitors from 2015 and the er & es monitors from 2016) suffered from.  When the Free-Sync Viewing Mode is activated the 25f's main flaw, which is its preset green dominance, is mainly visible when viewing brown, grey and white, and is clearly demonstrated in the first (grey bedroom in Dying Light) and fourth (black and white screen shot from the Fallout 4 opening) un-calibrated versus calibrated photo comparisons found in the next section of this review.