BenQ SW320 looks like the real deal

I've had a BenQ SW320 monitor for a few weeks now, deciding to get one after having a positive experience with the smaller 27" BenQ SW2700PT. It has been a very busy time both at the print shop and outside of it, so I haven't had time to do much more than plug the SW320 in, trouble shoot the new version of the Palette Master Element software needed to calibrate the display, and then use it for a few pieces of retouching and print production work.

But the summary so far is that I'm quite impressed with this monitor. At a price of just under $1600 CDN and a list of specifications that would be at home on MUCH higher priced units, this is a great bang for buck 4K colour critical display. It's about 1 inch wider than my NEC PA302W and about 1 inch less in height... but offering a hefty resolution of 3840x2160‎ compared to the NEC's 2560x1600, it packs a lot more working real estate into what is essentially the same viewing square footage.

The BenQ is 139 pixels per inch, compared to the NEC at 101 PPI, so there is some adjusting necessary to get various icons, fonts, etc. to a comfortable viewing & reading size. I'm still working out some of those things but so far it's not proving to be a big challenge for my eyes.

Among the high spec features of the SW320 is very close to 100% coverage of the Adobe RGB 1998 gamut; it actually exceeds Adobe RGB in some hues, falling short mainly in a thin slice of saturated reds. The SW320 panel supposedly supports a 10-bit video pipeline, but I'm not in a position to test that for awhile. And, as with its cousin the SW2700PT, the SW320 has on-board hardware calibration via 14-bit LUT's, when driven by the proprietary Palette Master Element software, to provide neutral greys and accurate colour with virtually zero risk of any banding or loss of tone levels. Physically, the matte screen is clear, with even viewing aided by a luminance uniformity function that seems to do its job and a monitor hood for blocking out stray ambient light from the sides.

One of the few slightly negative observations I had about the earlier SW2700PT (which I'm looking at as I type this), was that the smaller monitor felt a bit lightweight and cheap in its construction compared to my tank-like NEC monitors. This observation doesn't apply to the SW320; it's a straight forward, functional design that won't likely win any style awards, but it's also very solid in its construction. It looks and feels like a serious piece of kit, especially with the hood mounted on it.

My primary, somewhat negative comment relates to the Palette Master Element software. As before with the SW2700PT, I find Palette Master is slow and flakey with the SW320. Even though the software supposedly supports my i1 Pro 2 spectro, I've never been able to successfully calibrate either of my BenQ monitors with the spectro, using any version of Palette Master. Both the i1 Display Pro and Spyder 5 colorimeters work fine, however Palette Master is quite slow in operation, spending many minutes in a state of "writing to the LUT". And various bugs keeps popping up. For example in the latest version 1.2.2, if I enter my own custom name for the monitor profile, the software runs fully through to completion and then simply doesn't create a profile under any name, anywhere on the system. To get a profile I have to leave the default software-generated profile name alone and then rename it later to my own naming standard. This kind of stuff is just shoddy software QC, which sadly seems to be more the norm than the exception these days.

As I've mentioned elsewhere when talking about these new high spec BenQ displays, we can't really know what long-term reliability and support is going to be like, something about which I personally have 100% confidence when talking about my benchmark NEC Spectraview monitors.

But other than the reliability question, and a few minor niggling details, the BenQ SW320 so far is shaping up to be a killer 4K colour critical monitor. If you're looking to upgrade your monitor in the next while, I can recommend taking a very close look at BenQ. Right now the price / performance of these monitors offers a really amazing value.

Thanks for the candid review Royce. Lets hope they get the software sorted out. These monitors do seem to be a great value for much less than NEC and a small fraction of the EIZO monitors that are considered the photo standards.

In comparison, the equivalent NEC model is the PA322 UHD, a 32" display with 3840x2160 resolution. About the lowest legitimate price I'm seeing for it right now in Canada is around $5200 CDN, not including hood, Spectraview software or colorimeter device. While the true 4K Eizo CG318 (resolution of 4096 x 2160) I see listed for the low low price of $10,600 CDN. (!!!) Not many photographers would choose to spring that kind of cash for a monitor. The BenQ is much more accessible... for that kind of price difference I can put up with the software quirks for some time.

Thanks for the review Royce. I've just bought the BenQ SW2700PT monitor a few days ago after reading your positive comments on it and I'm very pleased indeed with it.

The Eizo is in the $6K USD range here in the US and the NEC is under $3K USD.

Yeah, crazy Canadian pricing on some of these products...

I've been looking forward to your review, Royce. This monitor is now  definitely on my wish list.

Can you tell us what graphics card you are using to drive the monitor?

John

John, for now I'm using older Nvidia GeForce GTX 6xx series cards to drive the SW320 over DisplayPort. I thought I'd try a torture test by just dropping the new monitor into my existing setup, without upgrading anything else. It's working fine for resolution and refresh rate, other general performance is acceptable. But this is why I can't test the 10-bit video pipeline yet, for one thing. With my next round of laptop and workstation upgrades, I'll move to Nvidia Quadro cards across the board, and see about finally getting 10-bit up and running.