Hi all.
I've just bought the BenQ SW242Q 2k monitor to sit with my other BenQ PD2700Q monitors So thought i would share what it is and some caveats.
I'm not an expert but these are my thoughts and experiences so far.
It's around £445- £460 similar in US Dollar or Euro. The equivalent 27" is between £899 - £1199 for 2k or 4k panel.
First off it's 99% Adobe RGB as well as sRGB and P3 so covers all the ways you can display on one screen. It has a 16bit 3D LUT built in hardware.
There is no separate puck. More on that later. The screen is matt so very little reflections from strong lights. I use a D50 5000k light to the side of my desktop setup and there is no appreciable reflections on either screen. Yours may differ depending where your light is.
It's a 2560 x 1600 resolution monitor. At 24" diagonal 16:10 aspect ratio, I did say 16:10 so what does that mean in the real world.
The visual display size is 520mm wide and 325 mm high. Another way of looking at it is you can fit 2 A4 sheets of paper side by side in portrait mode and still have a screen border around them.
That's quite a bit of visual real estate.
My BenQ PD2700Q is a 27" diagonal designer monitor at 2560 x 1440 resolution. 16:9 aspect ratio
Visual display size is 600mm wide and 340mm high.
That's not much of a difference. Looking at both monitors side by side you soon forget there is a screen size difference.
It comes with Display port 1.4 and Mini display port 1.4 HDMI 2.0 USB-B upstream and 2x USB 3.1 downstream, It can power a laptop via a USB-C cable at 90w and a card reader.
A full set of cables and is very easy to put together, Took about 3 minutes.
Images look amazing on screen as there is no appreciable glare distracting you. There is no amp glow in the corners that can sometimes happen.
It has paper sync which simulates what an image looks like using any paper profiles you may use before printing.
As i have never seen or used an Adobe RGB screen before i can't in all honesty say i am blown away looking at side by side images on all 3 monitors. I have the SW242Q between the 27" ones.
My normal monitors are fantastic panels and i love using them. I'm not a photographer doing landscapes and peoples portraits and seeing the nuances of colours in the natural world. Nor am i printing on a professional grade printer, Mines an Epson ET 18100. So maybe I'm looking at the wrong kind of image. Having said that if your comparing it with a lower cost monitor then the difference would be night and day.
Right.. niggle number 1 the screen controls are under the bottom bezel and are tiny and have a hard rubbery feel. They are buttons not the long metal side ones found on my other monitors.
This makes them difficult to use and there are no marks on the bezel face to show you where the buttons are as on my 27"
There is a puck control button that can be moved around to navigate the main menu. Again this is tiny but you can manage to navigate through that menu easily once you get used to how it moves. The other 3 buttons control different menus and the far right one is the on/off button.
You can't just tap a button and pull up the full menu as you can on the 27" which begs the question why there are no markers on the front face of the bezel to say which button is which. Picky i know but it's a problem for me.
The menus that are built in are very comprehensive, showing you the pre-set kelvins you can have, Screen calibrations etc etc
It's calibrated out of the box which is great, sitting next to my Spyder Pro 5 calibrated monitors it looks almost identical though better resolution and definition.
Which brings me to my 2nd and most annoying thing about this monitor, the calibration aspect.
You must have one of the following. If you don't have one you can't use Palette Master Ultimate which is the hardware calibration software. That means my Spyder 5 is now useless for this monitor.
It says and i quote 'For hardware calibration and convenient colour management'
The cheapest of these is the Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra at £156 and the X-rite i1 Display pro HL at £159 on Amazon as of today 19/12/2024, So for me to calibrate the monitor i need to buy another calibration puck.
You also need to login to the software using Gmail, Apple or WeChat or be a guest. Though not necessary. Why can't i just make an account and log in with my current email not be forced to have to make one of these 3 ?????
For Spyder Pro 5 issue:
It seems that this calibrator is currently not on the support list. What I can help with is forwarding your feedback to our software engineering team for further reference, so they can check if this model calibrator can be supported in the near future. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused. For more details, please refer to the link below:
These are from my conversation with tech support. So maybe i can use what i have in some future date though i will probably have to buy a new puck.
So is this a monitor worth having. Yes, It's big enough to display all you need, It gives you all the colour spaces you could wish for, It's half the price of the 27" version and isn't that much smaller in display area. Price point even if you have to buy a new calibration puck will be around £601-£616. That's not bad for a full colour pallet monitor that has a large screen size but small footprint.
Anyway that's my thoughts on this monitor.
I've just bought the BenQ SW242Q 2k monitor to sit with my other BenQ PD2700Q monitors So thought i would share what it is and some caveats.
I'm not an expert but these are my thoughts and experiences so far.
It's around £445- £460 similar in US Dollar or Euro. The equivalent 27" is between £899 - £1199 for 2k or 4k panel.
First off it's 99% Adobe RGB as well as sRGB and P3 so covers all the ways you can display on one screen. It has a 16bit 3D LUT built in hardware.
There is no separate puck. More on that later. The screen is matt so very little reflections from strong lights. I use a D50 5000k light to the side of my desktop setup and there is no appreciable reflections on either screen. Yours may differ depending where your light is.
It's a 2560 x 1600 resolution monitor. At 24" diagonal 16:10 aspect ratio, I did say 16:10 so what does that mean in the real world.
The visual display size is 520mm wide and 325 mm high. Another way of looking at it is you can fit 2 A4 sheets of paper side by side in portrait mode and still have a screen border around them.
That's quite a bit of visual real estate.
My BenQ PD2700Q is a 27" diagonal designer monitor at 2560 x 1440 resolution. 16:9 aspect ratio
Visual display size is 600mm wide and 340mm high.
That's not much of a difference. Looking at both monitors side by side you soon forget there is a screen size difference.
It comes with Display port 1.4 and Mini display port 1.4 HDMI 2.0 USB-B upstream and 2x USB 3.1 downstream, It can power a laptop via a USB-C cable at 90w and a card reader.
A full set of cables and is very easy to put together, Took about 3 minutes.
Images look amazing on screen as there is no appreciable glare distracting you. There is no amp glow in the corners that can sometimes happen.
It has paper sync which simulates what an image looks like using any paper profiles you may use before printing.
As i have never seen or used an Adobe RGB screen before i can't in all honesty say i am blown away looking at side by side images on all 3 monitors. I have the SW242Q between the 27" ones.
My normal monitors are fantastic panels and i love using them. I'm not a photographer doing landscapes and peoples portraits and seeing the nuances of colours in the natural world. Nor am i printing on a professional grade printer, Mines an Epson ET 18100. So maybe I'm looking at the wrong kind of image. Having said that if your comparing it with a lower cost monitor then the difference would be night and day.
Right.. niggle number 1 the screen controls are under the bottom bezel and are tiny and have a hard rubbery feel. They are buttons not the long metal side ones found on my other monitors.
This makes them difficult to use and there are no marks on the bezel face to show you where the buttons are as on my 27"
There is a puck control button that can be moved around to navigate the main menu. Again this is tiny but you can manage to navigate through that menu easily once you get used to how it moves. The other 3 buttons control different menus and the far right one is the on/off button.
You can't just tap a button and pull up the full menu as you can on the 27" which begs the question why there are no markers on the front face of the bezel to say which button is which. Picky i know but it's a problem for me.
The menus that are built in are very comprehensive, showing you the pre-set kelvins you can have, Screen calibrations etc etc
It's calibrated out of the box which is great, sitting next to my Spyder Pro 5 calibrated monitors it looks almost identical though better resolution and definition.
Which brings me to my 2nd and most annoying thing about this monitor, the calibration aspect.
You must have one of the following. If you don't have one you can't use Palette Master Ultimate which is the hardware calibration software. That means my Spyder 5 is now useless for this monitor.
It says and i quote 'For hardware calibration and convenient colour management'
The cheapest of these is the Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra at £156 and the X-rite i1 Display pro HL at £159 on Amazon as of today 19/12/2024, So for me to calibrate the monitor i need to buy another calibration puck.
You also need to login to the software using Gmail, Apple or WeChat or be a guest. Though not necessary. Why can't i just make an account and log in with my current email not be forced to have to make one of these 3 ?????
For Spyder Pro 5 issue:
It seems that this calibrator is currently not on the support list. What I can help with is forwarding your feedback to our software engineering team for further reference, so they can check if this model calibrator can be supported in the near future. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused. For more details, please refer to the link below:
These are from my conversation with tech support. So maybe i can use what i have in some future date though i will probably have to buy a new puck.
So is this a monitor worth having. Yes, It's big enough to display all you need, It gives you all the colour spaces you could wish for, It's half the price of the 27" version and isn't that much smaller in display area. Price point even if you have to buy a new calibration puck will be around £601-£616. That's not bad for a full colour pallet monitor that has a large screen size but small footprint.
Anyway that's my thoughts on this monitor.