The pandemic drags on but work continues from home, so does gaming and content consumption, which makes it worth your while to invest in a good monitor. Agreed that you have a large television set in the living room for the entire family but what’s there in your den, especially if you are into content creation? For a couple of weeks we tried the BenQ EW3280U, which is a unique offering, especially for those who have a lot of work around Adobe suite.

What the EW3280U (yup, it’s a mouthful) offers is top-of-the-line colour reproduction combined with sound that will blow you away, given that it’s a monitor for work. Out of the box, the 32-inch 4K monitor works like magic offering a resolution of 3840x2160. Slightly heavy, but it took me around 20 minutes to get the monitor running after fixing the stand that’s in the box (most of the time was spent carrying the monitor around!). This is an IPS panel with 60Hz refresh rate, 400 nits brightness and a contrast ration of 1000:1. What is more important is that there is 95 per cent DCI-P3 coverege.

Meant for content creators

The colour reproduction is absolutely spot on and has a 178-degree viewing angle from left to right and top to bottom. In case you are running a couple of these monitors together — content creators do — you will have nothing to complain about. Making the monitor outstanding are viewing angles. If you are not perfectly centred with the screen, still you won’t have an issue colour correcting pictures or editing videos. Slightly away from the monitor or if the device is tilted, the picture quality remains steady.

Diving in further, the panel doesn’t use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) dimming, which can make the screen flicker at specific rates. This is important because chances of getting headaches while using this monitor is greatly reduced. Further, pixels are super sharp with minimal glare, so the balance between diffusion and clarity is on point.

In case you are watching movies or playing videogames, HDR is an important aspect. Several modes get emulated on the monitor — Display HDR, Game HDRi and Cinema HDRi. HDRi is a proprietary technology that enhances HDR content with intelligent control, clarity adjustments and vivid colours. I liked keeping it to Game HDRi most of the time because there is a good balance between colour saturation and brightness while Cinema HDRi pumps up the colours.

This obviously brings us to gaming. What’s great about the monitor is minimal motion blur with Advanced Motion Acceleration. Don’t set it at premium, for it may lead to some colour overshoot but ‘high’ is a good enough mode.

Making content consumption on this monitor enjoyable is the brightness sensor that can detect the amount of light in the room to adjust the monitor accordingly, which goes a long way in tackling eye fatigue. Besides, there is a series of features under blue light mode, which can change the look of pictures dramatically. You can set it to multimedia, web surfing, reading, office or even epaper, all of which helps to juggle office work and content consumption.

But the feature that may tilt your purchase decision in favour of EW3280U is the built-in 2.1 channel speakers powered by treVolo. It’s like having a soundbar on the monitor and is particularly helpful if you don’t want to have speakers on your desk. They are far better than the tiny sound cans you are usually gifted. Agreed it’s not booming sound here for which you have the headphone but watching a movie on this monitor is an amazing experience.

That you are not stuck with a box of a screen you can’t do much with makes this worth a look. Despite the premium the monitor attracts, it’s a long-term purchase you won’t regret, especially if you spend hours before the screen, It’s truly a canvas for content creators.

At a glance

Device: BenQ EW3280U

Price: Rs 54,990

High notes

• Comes with HDRi Technology

• Absence of PWM makes it easy on the eye

• Outstanding set of attached speakers

• Great viewing angles

Muffled notes

• The stand offers very little in way of tilt