BenQ Launches SW321C 32-inch Monitor

[AleksandarK]

BenQ today announced the latest addition to its monitor family design for professional use. The SW321C, as it is called, is a 32-inch monitor with an IPS panel of 4K (3840×2160p) resolution. The panel itself is a 60 Hz screen with 250 nits of brightness, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 5 ms GtG response time, and it offers 178-degree viewing angles, which is standard for IPS panels. When it comes to the color coverage and the ability to accurately represent them, the SW321C features 95% of the DCI-P3, 99% of the Adobe RGB, and 100% of the sRGB color gamut. It has a 16-bit 3D look-up table (LUT) and features calibration for DeltaE ≤ 2.

The monitor comes with HDR10 specification, however, due to the brightness of 250 nits, it is not capable of performing any serious HDR content editing. Another interesting note is that this monitor supports Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) standard, which is an uncommon one. For input, the monitor had support for one DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.0, and one USB-C port. There is a dual-port USB hub, which has an SD card reader right next to it, making this very useful feature for photographers. Exact pricing and availability of this monitor are unknown, however, it is supposed to hit the market soon.


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[Dammeron]

Still waiting for a 4K 120Hz display with wide gamut, that does not look like a toy.

 

[bug]

Still waiting for a 4K 120Hz display with wide gamut, that does not look like a toy.

I hope you're not going to game on that. Cause if you are, I'm curious what are you using to push 120fps@4k
I' like to see wide gamut 4k with proper HDR/dimming instead.

 

[Vayra86]

The purpose of this thing eludes me. They can put a fancy 'oh look I'm professional' bunch of plastic shields on top of it but that doesn't make this useful either.

1000:1 IPS is bog standard and wide gamut isn't exactly special either anymore. The rest.. yeah. Ok. You can calibrate a shitty panel, yay. IPS barely needs it anyway.

But that 250nits does give it away...that is a very weak brightness range. You can rest assured that its also a pretty slow G2G IPS as well.

Still waiting for a 4K 120Hz display with wide gamut, that does not look like a toy.

I believe its called an OLED TV nowadays... Too bad of its diagonal, not exactly desk suited

 

[xkm1948]

I hope you're not going to game on that. Cause if you are, I'm curious what are you using to push 120fps@4k
I' like to see wide gamut 4k with proper HDR/dimming instead.

With Variable Rate Shadering applied, 2080Super and 2080Ti can easily push 4k 100+ Hz

 

[bug]

The purpose of this thing eludes me. They can put a fancy 'oh look I'm professional' bunch of plastic shields on top of it but that doesn't make this useful either.

1000:1 IPS is bog standard and wide gamut isn't exactly special either anymore. The rest.. yeah. Ok. You can calibrate a shitty panel, yay. IPS barely needs it anyway.

But that 250nits does give it away...that is a very weak brightness range. You can rest assured that its also a pretty slow G2G IPS as well.

That's actually ok. Without HDR, professional monitors are calibrated at or around 120 nits anyway. But uniformity is tricky to get right at 32" (and above).

 

[Dammeron]

I hope you're not going to game on that. Cause if you are, I'm curious what are you using to push 120fps@4k

I don't plan to change the display within 5-10 years after purchase, so that little leeway is welcomed. Even now I work/play on HP LP2475w which i bought in 2010. I think in 5 years 4K 120Hz will become common.

I' like to see wide gamut 4k with proper HDR/dimming instead.

Dimming, or OLED/microLED. And with an acceptable price, not 2-3k $ or even more...

 

[kapone32]

I hope you're not going to game on that. Cause if you are, I'm curious what are you using to push 120fps@4k
I' like to see wide gamut 4k with proper HDR/dimming instead.

If you have games that support it Vega crossfire can easily give you that in some games.

 

[Vayra86]

That's actually ok. Without HDR, professional monitors are calibrated at or around 120 nits anyway. But uniformity is tricky to get right at 32" (and above).

Without HDR, definitely... I suppose this is mostly for workflows that end up on a printer somewhere, want a lot of pixels at a decent (discernable) PPI and have no other wants or needs... seems pretty limited for a pro 4K panel in 2020. I don't know. It feels cheap, implementing HDR10 and all, but having such meh specs. On a gamer monitor you can chalk it up to branding/marketing but here...

If you have games that support it Vega crossfire can easily give you that in some games.

Pretty big if

 

[bug]

Without HDR, definitely... I suppose this is mostly for workflows that end up on a printer somewhere, want a lot of pixels at a decent (discernible) PPI and have no other wants or needs... seems pretty limited for a pro 4K panel in 2020. I don't know. It feels cheap, implementing HDR10 and all, but having such meh specs. On a gamer monitor you can chalk it up to branding/marketing but here...

Oh, you're right about that. "Pro" and "Benq" don't go together in my head either. I was just saying of all the flaws you can find in this monitor, max brightness isn't one of them

If you have games that support it Vega crossfire can easily give you that in some games.

Yeah, I wasn't talking Minesweeper

I don't plan to change the display within 5-10 years after purchase, so that little leeway is welcomed. Even now I work/play on HP LP2475w which i bought in 2010. I think in 5 years 4K 120Hz will become common.

HP ZR24 here, still going strong. Can't remember when I bought it.

Dimming, or OLED/microLED. And with an acceptable price, not 2-3k $ or even more...

Dimming is implemented poorly so far. Best case scenario, you get 384 zones, which will give you 20,000 pixels or so per zone. Halos galore.
OLED is iffy for a monitor with its image retention. Plus, there's like a handful of options available.
Microdimming might be acceptable, but it's not really available. Probably fewer models out there than there are OLED monitors.

I think I'll sit this round out and get a plain wide gamut monitor, until manufacturers figure out HDR.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Really poor specs IMO and what does it add over it's predecessor?

 

[bug]

Really poor specs IMO and what does it add over it's predecessor?

Apparently there are more features on that list that didn't make it to the announcement, so nobody posted them. Or so I was told, I didn't bother to check.

 

[stimpy88]

A load of crap. PC monitors are a joke in 2020.

 

[bug]

A load of crap. PC monitors are a joke in 2020.

They're not worse than they were in 2019. Or any year before that. There are features I'd like to have that are too expensive at the moment (there always are), but other than that, I don't what do you consider a joke about them.

 

[stimpy88]

They're not worse than they were in 2019. Or any year before that. There are features I'd like to have that are too expensive at the moment (there always are), but other than that, I don't what do you consider a joke about them.

You answered your own question...

 

[bug]

You answered your own question...

So they're terrible because not everything about them is mainstream? You're going to wait a long while to see a non-terrible monitor with that mindset.

 

[Dammeron]

HP ZR24 here, still going strong. Can't remember when I bought it.

ZR24 was next after mine, however it lost the wide gamut compared to his older brother. Then was ZR2440, but that was a piece of crap - 6bit+FRC instead of full 8bit).

Dimming is implemented poorly so far. Best case scenario, you get 384 zones, which will give you 20,000 pixels or so per zone. Halos galore.

Well, there's Asus PA32UCG (1152 zones) and Dell UP3221Q (2000 zones) coming soon, so it's getting better. Still, price is most likely a huge 'no'.

 

[bug]

ZR24 was next after mine, however it lost the wide gamut compared to his older brother. Then was ZR2440, but that was a piece of crap - 6bit+FRC instead of full 8bit).

Even without the wide gamut (which I miss), it was still one of my better investments.

Well, there's Asus PA32UCG (1152 zones) and Dell UP3221Q (2000 zones) coming soon, so it's getting better. Still, price is most likely a huge 'no'.

Yeah, that upcoming Dell still puts ~4,000 pixels in one dimming zone, so even though it will cost an arm and a leg, it will still halo. I'm just going to get the U3220Q to get my wide gamut back till good HDR really becomes more affordable.

 

[ARF]

So, what is exactly this 60 Hz in monitors? The frame rate output from the graphics card at which there will be no tearing, the Sync frequency?
The horizontal refresh rate is 138.7 kHz..

The horizontal sync frequency is just the number of times per second the monitor can write a horizontal scan line; it is the single most important statistic about your monitor. The vertical sync frequency is the number of times per second the monitor can traverse its beam vertically.

http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Video-Timings-HOWTO/basic.html

The refresh rate (most commonly the "vertical refresh rate", "vertical scan rate" for cathode ray tubes) is the number of times in a second that a display hardware updates its buffer. This is distinct from the measure of frame rate which means updating with new data. The refresh rate includes the repeated drawing of identical frames, while frame rate measures how often a video source can feed an entire frame of new data to a display.

Refresh rate - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Horizontal scan rate

, or horizontal frequency, usually expressed in kilohertz, is the frequency at which a CRT moves the electron beam from the left side of the display to the right and back, and therefore describes the number of horizontal lines displayed per second. CRT timings include some horizontal scans before the visible display, after it, and during the travel from bottom to top (known as vertical back porch, vertical front porch, and vertical sync width, respectively, and collectively known as vertical blank time), so the horizontal scan rate does not directly correlate to visible display lines, unless the unseen lines are also known, but it can still be used to approximate the display lines, as the total blank time is usually a small but significant portion of the total lines.
It is usually the most limiting factor of a CRT display.

Horizontal scan rate - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[bug]

@ARF Great comment. If this were a thread about CRTs.

 

[ARF]

What is vertical refresh rate and what is its function if there is the so called pixel clock that is much faster?
Why do monitors need to scan both horizontally and vertically?