Lenovo ThinkVision Pro 2840m

A stylish looking panel, but its chic looks conceal some serious problems

£450 | $799 

Most of the monitors on test this month get so much right, it seems all the wrongness has been reserved for Lenovo’s unfortunate ThinkVision. To be clear, this is largely a high quality product from a normally highly reliable brand. The chassis is a nice bit of engineering, as is the fully adjustable stand. Overall, it feels reassuringly expensive. However, it has serious problems. It starts with the glass cover over the screen. No doubt product managers at Lenovo spotted the same feature on Apple’s hot-selling iMacs and assumed it’s a premium feature that buyers want. Indeed, it might be a feature Apple customers like, but it’s not one that improves a PC monitor. It’s one that introduces unwanted reflectivity in return for zero improvement in image quality. 

Crushed to death

Bad indeed, but not actually the worst problem. No, that involves this monitor’s image-processing chipset. The default setup is off-the-map wonky, with crushed details in white tones and a similar lack of definition in the black scales. This thing is just compression city.Normally, that kind of thing is the result of a wonky factory setting that can be mitigated through on-screen display tweaks and, if necessary, some image-tuning using your graphics driver. But not here. For starters, the options in the OSD are limited. There’s no gamma adjustability and the contrast option really only serves as a brightness adjustment. It doesn’t help matters at all.Into the Nvidia driver, then – but oh no, that’s not helping either. In fact, we can’t remember the last time we tested a display with such wonky default settings that we were unable to arrive at a semiacceptable solution through the video driver. It’s very disappointing.In fairness, when you’re not looking at test images, the ThinkVision doesn’t look awful. Actually, it looks pretty nice at a glance, but you will spot the compression problems from time to time, and it will drive you crazy.In other regards, it’s broadly on a par with the rest of the brave new 28-inch 4K brigade. Colours are impressively vibrant for a TN, and even pretty decent by IPS standards. Likewise, black levels and light leakage in general are kept well in check (even if its glass cover does a decent job of disguising that).As ever, then, it’s the mediocre vertical viewing angles that give the TN game away. Oh yeah, and just in case you aren’t already terminally put off, it also suffers from a spot of input lag. Nice. All in all, this isn’t a monitor that we can recommend. Not even a qualified “It’s okay if you don’t mind x and y.” Sadly, this is a screen that we must in all conscience warn you away from in its current state. With tweaked electronics it might be a possibility for anyone wanting a screen with a cover, but until then, steer well clear.

Looks like a quality product, but unfortunately its default settings are no good at all.

Price:£450/$799
Manufacturer: Lenovo
Size: 28-inch-TN
Resolution: 3,840 x 2,160
Viewing angles: 170/160°
Contrast: 3,000:1
Response: 5ms
VESA mount: 100 x 100mm