BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX review
The high-end PC monitor market has been all about OLED for the last 18 months or so. It's been one big-money OLED after another. But this BenQ MOBIUZ EX321UX has just landed to remind us that, yes, there is actually an alternative. This is a conventional 4K 32-inch LCD panel but with a mini-LED backlight enabling OLED-baiting HDR visual sizzle.
It's a full-array affair with 1,152 zones. On paper, it enables HDR1000 support, which means a peak brightness of 1,000 nits. This panel will also do fully 700 nits full-screen, something that no existing OLED monitor can even approach. Even the latest generation large-screen OLED tech tops out at about 250 nits full screen.
Indeed, with a typical price of around $1,200, this BenQ really does need to do something a bit special to justify its existence. Currently, 4k 32-inch OLED panels can be had from around $800. An LCD panel for 50% more cash is a serious ask.
Anyway, what with all the attention on OLED of late, it's worth briefly recapping what this mini-LED, full-array shizzle is all about. The idea is to use an active backlight to compensate for the fact that LCD panels allow light to leak through even when a given pixel is supposed to be switched off or showing a very dark colour.
Screen size: 32-inch
Resolution: 3,840 x 2,160
Brightness: 1000 nits HDR, 700 nits typical
Colour coverage: 99% DCI-P3
Response time: 1 ms
Refresh rate: 144 Hz
HDR: HDR1000
Features: IPS panel, 1,152 dimming zones, HDMI 2.1 x3, DisplayPort 1.4, USB-C, KVM switch
Price:$1,199 | £1,108
To fix that, theoretically at least, you use a backlight split into zones. That allows the backlight intensity to vary across the panel according to the image being shown. For brighter areas of the image, you crank up those zones, for darker areas, the opposite.
If that sounds like a neat trick and a good idea, it comes with downsides. We'll dig into the details momentarily, but the basics involve weirdnesses arising from the algorithms used to control the zones
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