The IT Nerd

BenQ makes great monitors. Every time they send me one for review, I tend to walk away impressed. Then the BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX showed up via FedEx a last week. And I have to say that BenQ came up with a monitor that is almost perfect. Let’s start with the look of the monitor from the front:

This is a plain, black bezeled boring monitor if you look at it from the front. And that is the exact opposite of most gaming monitors that I encounter. The back is white and the monitor comes with a stand that is also white, but has a few orange/copper accents along with being height, swivel and tilt adjustable. I didn’t bother using that stand during my testing and instead mounted it to this monitor arm on my desk as the monitor has a VESA mount on the back. It also is devoid of any RGB lighting. This is a good move on BenQ’s part as they bill this as a gaming monitor, but they clearly designed it to be used in environments other than the basement of some guy who would only use this monitor only to play Call Of Duty Warzone. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

There are two things that I would like to highlight on the back of the monitor. First is the 100×100 mm VESA mount that allows you to mount the monitor on your own stand as I did. The second is the significant amount of ports on this monitor. Here’s a list:

• HDMI v2.1 eARC
• 2 x HDMI v2.1
• DisplayPort v2.1
• USB-C with 65W Power Delivery, DisplayPort Alt Mode, data transfer
• USB-C upstream (USB 3.1 Gen 1, 5 Gbps, data transfer only)
• 3 x USB-A downstream (USB 3.1 Gen 1, 5 Gbps, power charging 4.5W)
• USB-C downstream (USB 3.1 Gen 1, 5 Gbps, power charging 7.5W)
• 1/8″ headphone jack

That is a healthy selection of ports. But some of you might be noticing that in terms of the ports, the math doesn’t quite add up as you can’t see all of them. That’s because these ports are on the bottom left of the monitor:

This is another good move by BenQ as it makes these ports easy to access should you need them. I would have liked to see all of these USB ports being 10 Gbps ports rather than 5 Gbps ports. But they will work for most use cases. For those who need 10 Gbps or faster speeds, a thunderbolt dock might be your best option.

Pro Tip: I wasn’t getting 5 Gbps a second when I first started testing the ports on this monitor. That was until I noticed this when I was looking through the monitor settings:

Once I set it to USB 3.1 Gen1, I started to get the speeds that I was expecting.

I should note that there are no internal speakers, but the headphone jack has three different sound modes that provide a decent approximation of surround audio. And if you need better sound, you can plug in a soundbar into the eARC HDMI port and get your high quality sound fix that way. As a bonus, there’s KVM support. That means you can hook up a PC and Mac to this monitor for example and use one monitor, keyboard and mouse with both.

Also of note, this monitor comes with a remote control. It provides quick access to picture modes, settings memories, brightness, and the heads-up display with signal and frame rate info. I have to admit though that I took out of the box, fooled around with it to see what it controlled, and put it back into the box. That’s because the joystick at the bottom centre of the monitor does such a good job of allowing you to control the monitor’s features. I should also note that I had to find a CR2032 battery to get the remote up and running as I didn’t find one in the box. Speaking of being in the box, every cable you might need is in the box, along with an external power brick that those who cable manage all the things may not be fond of.

To test this monitor, I set it up with my M1 Pro MacBook Pro running macOS Sonoma version 14.6.1. I ran all my USB gear through the monitor and connected the monitor via USB-C to create a one cable setup that would keep my Mac charged as well as provide access to things like my webcam and the like. That worked fine although my Mac was only getting 65W of power which meant it is theoretically possible that if I pushed the MacBook Pro hard enough, the monitor would not be able to supply enough power to the laptop. As a result, the laptop battery would start to deplete until the load on the laptop lessens and the monitor can start charging the laptop battery up again. I wasn’t able to get my laptop to exhibit this in my testing. So I guess that’s a non-issue. But it would have been nice if the monitor put out say 90W so that wouldn’t be an issue with any laptop that has high power demands. Gaming laptops for example.

I ended up running this monitor at 2560×1440 with variable refresh rates of 48-144 Hz enabled. Now that sounds like a weird resolution for me to run a 4K monitor in. But this is why I set it up that way. macOS does something called display scaling. That’s where the monitor actually runs at 4K resolution. But the macOS UI is scaled to something less. And given that I am on the wrong side of 40 years old, 4K resolution on a Mac results in text that is too small for me to read comfortably. So I am using a resolution that balances having a lot of screen real estate with the ability to read text. I should also note that I am using this resolution with the “low resolution” option. That’s something else that is unique to macOS where if you pick a resolution that has this option, you turn off the ability to render everything in macOS’s “retina” mode where everything looks super sharp, and instead it renders everything “normally” for lack of a better description. While there is a difference between the “retina” mode and the “low resolution” option when it comes to text sharpness on the screen, the difference is really slight. Likely because this monitor is sharp and clear when it comes to how text looks on it. Also running in “low resolution” mode covers up a bug in macOS and M1 processors where you can’t run certain resolutions with variable refresh rates and HDR turned on. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on that, you can read the details here.

So with that out of the way, how does this monitor perform? Brilliantly for the most part.

From a basic productivity standpoint, this is a great monitor for productivity work. Text is sharp and clear as I mentioned previously. Though one thing that I noted was that when HDR is turned on, the Eye Care functionality which is handy for those who work for eight hours a day in front of a monitor gets turned off. I’m guessing that BenQ is doing this to preserve the quality of how HDR looks on the screen.

To further find out how good this monitor was, I drove the monitor to a client who is a professional photographer and photo editor so that he could use this tool on it in order to compare his results to the calibration report that was in the box. Yes you read that correctly, there was a calibration report in the box of a gaming monitor. I perhaps should not have been surprised by that as that’s how BenQ rolls. But I still was surprised. In any case, here’s what he told me after testing the monitor for about 45 minutes:

• sRGB is spot on as he got an average error of just 1.37dE which from a colour accuracy perspective almost perfect. And this result was actually slightly better than the calibration report stated which was 1.38dE.
• Display P3 had average error of 1.41dE. Which again is visibly perfect from a colour perspective.

In short, if you do colour accurate work, this monitor is a great option for you.

Now over to HDR. When you have HDR turned on, you get five HDR modes to choose from:

Honestly, your best option is to use the Display HDR option. I found it to be the mode that mostly matched what my MacBook Pro displays, and I was also assured by my client that this was the most colour accurate HDR mode to run the monitor. One thing that I should point out is that the MacBook Pro has a glossy screen that boosts the contrast of what is on your screen, and the BenQ monitor is a matte screen that dulls the contrast slightly as it’s meant to control reflections. It also means that dark areas on the monitor are slightly more dark than they perhaps should be. Which I am fine with because of the fact that I am in a room where controlling light is problematic. Thus I will take a matte screen any day of the week on any monitor that I use. But I can see where that might be a non-starter for some who want a more vibrant picture. You’ll also note that there are sRBG and Display P3 options for colour accurate work. But you’ll need to disable HDR to use those which is a bit of a bummer. I am thinking that BenQ must have felt that enabling HDR in those modes would take away from the colour accuracy that this monitor has. I should also note that this monitor supports FreeSync Premium Pro so anything from a PS5 to a gaming PC can have smooth visuals with this monitor. And by having it on is how I am getting support for variable refresh rates.

As for the HDR performance, let’s touch on some numbers first. The BenQ monitor has a mini LED panel with 1152 dimming zones. My MacBook Pro for comparison purposes has 2554 dimming zones, and the Apple Pro Display XDR has 576 local dimming zones. The BenQ monitor is capable of doing 1000 nits of brightness at its peak. Again for comparison purposes, my MacBook Pro and the Pro Display XDR can do 1000 nits sustained brightness, and 1600 nits peak brightness for HDR content. The reason why I am pointing all of this out because when it comes to mini LED monitors like this one, the more local dimming zones, the better the HDR performance in theory. While this monitor doesn’t have the same number of dimming zones as the built in display of my MacBook Pro, it has twice as many when compared to the Pro Display XDR. As for the brightness, the 1600 nits of brightness that the Apple monitors are capable of are in “peak” circumstances. Meaning that you mostly won’t see this in your day to day existence. Instead you will see 1000 nits. That makes these monitors somewhat compatible.

After running a number of HDR videos on this monitor, I can say that this BenQ display is outstanding. Fooling around with some games, as well as Blur Busters TestUFO to test the motion clarity, I found that there were no issues that I could find on that front. One big plus is that this is the first monitor that I have encountered where I could control the brightness of the monitor in HDR mode as most monitors outside the Pro Display XDR don’t have such a feature. That’s a very welcome feature and I applaud BenQ for including it. The next thing that I want to point out is blooming. Or rather the lack of it. Blooming is an issue where one local dimming zone will be so bright that it will overwhelm the local dimming zone next to it. For example if you have a really bright local dimming zone and a dark one next to each other, the dark one will look grey rather than black, or you might see what I call a halo effect. I ran a bunch of test videos that I know will generate blooming problems with HDR monitors and didn’t find much if any blooming to speak of. So then I ran some blooming tests which pushed the monitor to its 1000 nits maximum brightness, and I did see that there were some minimal levels of blooming. But it was so minimal that it’s unlikely that anyone would care, assuming that they even noticed at all. I don’t know what magic BenQ put in this monitor to get this result, but I was impressed.

A Few last things that I should mention. BenQ allows you to create profiles and save those so that you can switch between say a colour accurate setup and a gaming setup easily. And for bonus points, you can switch profiles via the joystick controller, or the remote control. You can also use a piece of software called Colour Shuttle to tailor this monitor to specific games if you want to go next level with your gaming experience.

So is this the perfect monitor? Well as I mentioned before, the USB ports could be 10 Gbps rather than 5 Gbps. I also wish you could at least have the option to use HDR in Display P3 and sRGB modes, and I wished that power delivery to a laptop was higher than 65W. But given the performance and capabilities of this monitor, I’m more than willing to let all of that slide. The BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX is an outstanding monitor that allows you to do anything from Microsoft Word to colour accurate work during business hours, to pwning n00bs in your video game of choice after hours. In fact, I think BenQ is selling this monitor short by calling it a gaming monitor for that reason because it’s a great all around monitor that fits a huge number of use cases. Which is why I will be asking BenQ if I could buy this monitor from them as this is the sort of monitor that I have been waiting for to pair with my MacBook Pro with since I got it in 2021. Expect to pay $1599 CAD for one of these monitors which sounds expensive, but I would argue that it’s money well spent given what this monitor brings to the table.

This entry was posted on September 20, 2024 at 9:00 am and is filed under Products with tags BenQ. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.