HP 514PN Review: A Slick Portable Monitor That Can Brighten Your Workday, but Not Your Wallet

HP Series 5 Pro 514PN

Pros

• Thin and light
• Vivid colors and better-than-usual contrast
• Well designed

Cons

• Expensive
• No hardware controls beyond brightness

While «Neo:LED» is just an LG-branded version of its IPS Black panel with a mini-LED backlight — a low-power variation of the company’s QNED TV panels, which have been out for a while — the HP Series 5 Pro 514PN is the first of the new laptop screens we’ve seen which uses the technology. (Portable monitors are just laptop screens minus the laptop.)

Neo:LED theoretically consumes less power than the typical mini LED backlight, an obvious plus for a laptop, or in this case, an external display that may be running off the laptop’s battery. That, combined with high contrast, wide color gamut, brighter-than-usual screen and smart design makes the 14-inch HP 514PN stand out from a crowded field of brand name and no name competitors.

Well, that and the price: $299 is really high for this category, especially for 14 inches. And possibly why this monitor comes out of HP’s commercial display division. There’s quite a bit of time between now and when it ships at the end of November, so it’s possible the price will change in the interim.

Sleek design

You’d expect a lot of premium touches for the money, and HP doesn’t fail you. There’s a kickstand incorporated into the back, which props it up in both vertical and horizontal orientations. The display’s about the length of a piece of letter-sized paper standing vertically. The bundled cable has a small L-shaped connector, so it doesn’t spout out the top like a Teletubby antenna when it’s rotated, and there’s a USB-C connector with support for video input on each side.

The kickstand is steady regardless of orientation or angle. It’s not the thinnest or the lightest for its size, but at 9mm thick and 1.4 pounds, it falls at the correct end of the range. The package includes a thin magnetic cover — a nice touch and certainly something you’d expect at this price, but the magnet’s not terribly strong.

In addition to the connectors, on the right side is a power switch and brightness buttons. There are no other hardware controls, which means you’re dependent upon the software. Unsurprisingly, the Windows software is relatively full-featured, and it includes settings for brightness, color presets and rotation, as well as less common options like video level (limited vs. full range), black stretch, response time (which you shouldn’t need to use) and more. HP makes software for the Mac, and though I’m using it connected to a MacBook as I write this, it looks like the Mac software isn’t yet available from HP’s download site. Rotation seems to be built into the MacOS settings, though.

Solid color

Just because this monitor can cover a wide color gamut, doesn’t mean it can do so accurately. It’s rated at 100% of both P3 and Adobe RGB. That’s one area where OLED tends to fall short, as it has trouble with Adobe RGB.

The monitor’s not factory calibrated and lacks profiles, so it doesn’t clamp the gamut to a particular color space. That means at the edges of a space colors can be way off. It can be good for non-color-critical work in its default, Neutral preset. That seems to be most accurate for Adobe RGB.

Another of the listed advantages of the IPS Black Neo:LED screen is higher contrast than a traditional IPS panel, up to 2,000:1 compared to 1,000:1. That’s partly because IPS Black should deliver darker blacks, which the 514PN does — just not by enough and not when the brightness is increased. The antiglare finish also contributes to slightly lower contrast than you might otherwise see with a glossy display. It was still a little more reflective than I liked in dark areas.

I found that contrast generally measured around 1,450:1, rising as high as 1,650:1 in its native color space; native on most monitors means the color saturation and brightness are maxed out. But even 1,400:1 is better than a lot of portable monitors, and definitely good enough for work.

With the brightness cranked all the way up, it measured 427 nits. That’s comfortably higher than its rated peak of 400 nits, which means there’s some overhead built in to compensate for backlight degradation over the life of the monitor.

While the 514PN has a 75Hz refresh rate, I find it mixed for gaming. I initially thought it would be great as a companion to a handheld like the Steam Deck (or Nintendo Switch, but I don’t have one of those). And it is, as long as you don’t need speed; it doesn’t support variable refresh, so you’ll be locked to 60Hz. But the vivid colors are a plus, as long as you’re not used to the high contrast of an OLED screen on your device. While I experienced some artifacts when the frame rate on my Lenovo Legion Go S (SteamOS) dropped below 60 frames per second in Hades 2, the color and contrast were otherwise an improvement over the IPS screen on the handheld.

The HP 514PN is, overall, a nice portable monitor, especially when compared to the average offering. But $299 is a lot when it’s coming out of your own pocket; it’s possible HP could come out with a consumer model at a lower price (that doesn’t have a volume-buying markdown built in). The higher contrast may do your eyes a favor if you spend long days in front of it, though, which could mitigate the high cost somewhat.

How we test monitors

All measurements were performed using Portrait Display’s Calman Ultimate 2025 and later software using a Calibrite ColorChecker Display Plus (formerly X-Rite i1Display Pro Plus) and a Murideo Six-G pattern generator for HDR testing where necessary, or the Client3 HDR patterns within Calman, where possible. How extensive our testing is depends on the capabilities of the monitor, the screen and backlight technology used, and the judgment of the reviewer.

On the most basic models we may stick with just brightness, contrast and color gamut, while on more capable displays we may run tests of most user-selectable modes for gaming or color-critical usage, uniformity and so on. For the color work, we may also run tests to verify how white point accuracy varies with brightness.

Color accuracy results reported in units of Delta E 2000 are based on Calman’s standard Pantone patch set, plus the grayscale and skin tone patches. White points results are based on both the actual white value plus the correlated color temperature for the entire gray scale (21 patches, 0 to 100%) rounded down to the nearest 50K as long as there are no big variations. We also use Blur Busters‘ motion tests to judge motion artifacts (such as ghosting) or refresh rate-related problems that can affect gaming.