Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsBENQ SW271: Overall good, but BENQ are sleeping at the wheel, need to go back to business 101
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2018
I am an advanced hobbyist photographer and bought this monitor to implement an AdobeRBG 10bit workflow for art-grade photo prints on a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000.
This is a solidly built piece of equipment, the stand is very heavy and well constructed. I love the handle built into the stand. Packing was very good: I would not be concerned about damage in shipment. The panel itself is the usual plastic, but it's high quality in appearance and feel. The performance of the panel overall, is excellent. I'm getting verified 10bit workflow in Photoshop through an Nvidia Quadro P2000. I love the puck! Now can't live without it. Switching color spaces with the push of a button near the keyboard is a really nice innovation. The puck itself is a pretty high quality build. The buttons feel good and the display responds well. Monitor menus are pretty nice compared to the Dells I've been using for two decades. This panel blow away my Dell u2718q 27" 4k monitor. They are setup side by side and the dell looks like dog vomit compared to the BENQ, but then, they are not in the same class are they?
This is where the good ends and the not-so-good, to just dumb, begins:
- This panel has a single stuck blue pixel. This is a thousand dollar monitor targeting color perfectionists, so it's going back to amazon for a swap.
- There is some noticeable light bleed on the edges. It's not bad, but it's not great.
- The monitor ships with a DVI-to-mini-DVI cable. However, all the high end Nvidia Quadro cards have full sized DVI sockets, not mini. There is no mini DVI socket on the monitor, so the cable it comes with is useless if you bought a Quadro P1000 or higher. So I had to buy a new DVI to DVI cable. Lost a night of work because of this.
- The driver CD that ships with the monitor doesn't contain the pallet master software. Just download it right?? No... BENQ had an outage last night and so I could not download the pallet master software to verify the calibration and lost another night of work. It's back up today so I was able to download it.
- While I was doing that, saw there was a more recent monitor driver dated 2-5-2018. The one installed is dated 5-5-2017, so I obviously wanted to update. I downloaded the file and discovered it was packed in RAR format. Now kids, I am a huge nerd going way back, but my rar days are over. Luckily my little brother is still a huge nerd and unpacked it for me so i didn't have to download some shady unpacker. I install the driver and guess what? It's the exact same one as the existing one 5-5-2017. It's mislabeled on the BENQ website. I open the INF to very and sure enough. It's v1.0.0.0. So that was 15 minutes ill never get back. Thanks BENQ for wasting more of my time.
- In general, BENQs website performs well if you live in 1994. It's hosted in Taiwan. RTT to the site is over 200ms. My guess is that BENQ sells a few items in the US, so it might be nice to go ahead and drop a replica of the site over here. That, and hire just one native English speaker to proof your copy. Thanks.
- That calibration report. Yeah there is one, but you will need an electron microscope to read it. The issue is, they have enough content to fill an 8.5x14 sheet of paper but decided to print it on 8.5x11.
Summary
Good thing BENQ know how to build monitors, because they are not good at anything else. Wait, they shipped me a stuck pixel... so I'll rephrase: They're pretty good at building monitors that look great, except for a pixel or two, and light bleed, and they are not good at much else. With BENQ, it's death by a thousand cuts. For the price, I'm still a buy recommendation, but just barely. My advice is to buy this product from amazon so that you can send it back for any reason. BENQ's dead pixel policy would not cover my situation. BENQ should hire a few Apple execs, and implement 4% of what Apple do in terms of fit/finish/polish, which will make BENQ 400% better off than they are now, which means that right now as a business they seem very immature. XOXOXO
