BenQ PD3220U 4K Designer Monitor Review

So to start it all off, i am not a tech heavy guy. I do understand the details when it comes to my line of work but not much beyond. The monitor I had before this one was a HP w2207. I had to invest in a Spyder Elite 4 many years ago due to this old monitors unwillingness to display the right values. With a lot of tries I managed to somewhat wrangle it in the correct gamut range so it taught me what to look out for. My second monitor is a 24″ HD Cintiq from Wacom. This one also had to have a pass of the Spyder to manage the display range. The Cintiq had issues with white intensity or brightness rather than colors.

New Monitor

The first impression after connecting the cables was the size difference and the intensity and clarity of the display plus the fact you can smoothly rotate the display from horizontal position to vertical. 

Now as with all displays you have to calibrate it to show the exact colors when it is freshly connected with the pc. As my Cintiq already had been calibrated, I could notice a big difference of the displays. A good thing with the new monitor is that it has a lot of display settings. I quickly figured out, after some research, which standard to go for as it ships with a wide range of profiles and I chose dci-p3. It seemed to match the Cintiq the best and according to my findings, it would fit my use of the monitor the best but I still needed to adjust it into the right color space.

Performance

The quality is great. very strong contrast and color range. The physical menu is easy to navigate with your hand behind the lower right  corner. Unfortunately I am not that tech heavy guy but the monitor does provide a lot of cables in the package to allow a wide range of ways to connect it with other devices and even the options to have multiple inputs into the monitor so you can easily swap between them or split the screen up into 4 sections. The screen is massive and quality of resolution is impressive. I instantly found good use for the screen space. As a concept artist it is a great thing to have all this high resolution space as we can use it for references and also zoomed out view of the painting you are working on. The difference here is the screen space vs resolution which you can’t get on a smaller screen as it would not hold up in clarity and pixel density.

A Negative

Now for me one of the first things I reacted to was the 60Hz refresh rate and a subtle difference from the smaller older screen. It is understandable that it has a low refresh rate because of the screen size. To me it wasn’t a major thing or even a negative but it was something I noticed.

One thing I did notice is that if you are far to one side you can see a 1 pixel edge which is making it difficult to see the very edge of the screen. It is a small problem to have, I assume this is the case because of the slim profile of the beautiful design.

Sharpness

The screen has a great sharpness to it. I was used to my Cintiq’s resolution and sharpness but compared to this one the cintiq comes off as blurry which surprised me.

Summary

This screen is one of those things that once you have tried it, it will change your view entirely on screens and the use of them. I don’t think I could go back to a small screen after experiencing this. Yes it costs a lot and no, for a starting artist it is not important but when you get to a certain point these things can change how you approach design and art completely.

Monitor: 10/10