BenQ PD2720U monitor for color correction or grading?

First Look and Review of the BenQ PD2720U Monitor for Video Post-Processing Use

This post is a look at using the BenQ PD2720U monitor for color correction or grading. Is it a professional color correction monitor? Or at least usable for the wild-wild web?

I have more than 40 years of working with professional color standards for delivery to paying clients. There is a reason the standards exist: without them, all is chaos. Well, even with them, there’s still a lot of chaos! However you do have a leg to stand on, and a solid one at that, if your setup is properly color managed.

Standards … And Color Management … Matter!

So need to plan your color management system before you sit down to do any color/tonal corrective work. Only then can you know how your work will compare, on a proper system, to other professionally done work. Work done to “The Standard”. And the standard you need to comply with is the broadcast standards used for nearly all professional video work.

Can a monitor like the BenQ PD2720U stand up to the full standards of the broadcast world? Probably not. If you need to pass the muster of the heartless QC machines of network or streaming services. The standards for professional color correction monitors are very high.

Pro Broadcast Reference Monitors

Choosing a reference monitor is a HUGE part of the process of establishing a color management system. I work with professional colorists all the time. The guys & gals working broadcast, satellite, and film work. They do live or die financially by network QC standards. For them, a Flanders or Eizo monitor is pretty much required.

The cheapest current Flanders is a 1920×1080 Rec.709, 21.5″ screen selling for $1995. NOT including the SDI cables and the external BlackMagic or AJA boxes you will also want to ‘feed’ the proper signal to that monitor.

Most pro colorists need 10-bit however, and a bit more than a 21.5″ screen. So … you’re now looking at $4,000 or more for the monitor alone. And if you want a larger screen, 10-bit, and HDR … well, you’ve jumped to $20,000 and up.

Web-based video work doesn’t tend to pay the bills for that kind of gear. So what is a person to do? My business partner for all these years simply won’t go “there” for a nice 24″ 1920×1080 Flanders, let alone the larger 4K rigs. It isn’t a practical business solution for my clientele from any financial view.

Working For Web-Use in the Real World

This is where trade-offs become required. But going in, you need to know what you’re trading off for that lower price tag. What can you give up and still do good quality work for the web? What limits do those choices place on the work you can accept? And what should you tell your clients if they mention any possibility of broadcast use at a future time?

But remember throughout this article, that my personal standards are measured by what I’ve seen on Flanders and Eizo screens costing several times what most any “normal” computer monitor will cost!

So even coming close to my “goal” is a major achievement for any computer monitor. And my goal is simply a perfect gamma (tone) curve for the 2.4 gamma that I use, and a DeltaE chart of variance from ‘perfect’ color hues for pro-video standard video sRGB/Rec.709, that is never higher than the dE/2.2 that is the basis for professional colorist work.

These are the base standards of the Flanders/Eizo professional color correction monitors. Both of those goals are well above the vast majority of computer monitors out there, and until fairly recently, at most any price.

What am I willing … or required … to give up? At any lower price level than for the professional color correction monitors, you simply can’t get screens with the absolute evenness of pixel tones and hues. Edge to edge. Nor do you get the ability to load calibration LUTs into the monitor.

I can get by with a very close pixel color/tonal evenness across the screen. And I can get by with manually doing my color calibrations. I’m rather experienced with using the Xrite i1 Display Pro puck/software in “advanced mode. And with running a profile to check and verify that calibration using the Lightspace color profiling software in conjunction with BlackMagic Resolve.

So I was looking around for a monitor to test … and if it met my needs … to acquire.

BenQ has come out with a new series of “DesignVue Designer” monitors, designed for video use and claiming fairly high-end color accuracy. They supplied one for me to test and evaluate in real-world working conditions in my shop. I tested it both as it came out of the box, and after running a whole series of calibration runs with slightly different settings in the monitor and i1 Display Pro software.

And after every calibration, I ran a profile using the combination of Lightspace/Resolve.

After initial testing and full setup, I feel the BenQ PD2720U will work very well when in an appropriate viewing environment. And as with any other monitor, only when they are properly calibrated and profiled. This is again, intended for web-based end-use color correction.

BenQ PD2720U

This monitor is called a PD2720U, and is designed primarily for video color correction and viewing. It is accurately listed as “4k UHD” which is 3840×2160, compared to “4k DCI” or full pro-broadcast/theater 4k, which is 4096×2160. The measured screen diagonal is right at 27″. Image width/height are 23.5″x 13.4″.

And right off the bat, one huge advantage of this monitor for video work compared to any other computer monitor I’ve owned is the marvelous range of screen frequencies this can work with! For video work, you want that reference monitor refresh rate set to the same frame-rate as your media, or if not that, to double it. This monitor has 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 5o, 59, and 60 Hz refresh rates available. Very useful. And showing this is definitely conceived for video post processing work.

It is IPS with an LED backlight, and for color calibration work they suggest using the ‘RGB LED’ settings for profile generation. In testing, it comes pretty close to the listed Max Brightness rating of 350 nits (or cd/m2), and is listed as having 10 bit color. (Naturally for Rec.709, the only brightness I need is up to 100 nits.)

They list this monitor as covering 100% of Rec.709 and 96% of P3 color space, a larger color space than the long-time video standard of video sRGB/Rec.709. It has internal modes for DCI-P3 (theater P3), Display-P3 (Mac Retina standard), Adobe RGB, Rec.709, CAD/CAM, Animation, Low Blue Light, Darkroom (intended for video corrections in darkened suites), M-book, DICOM, and User (settable by the user). All can be quickly changed via the dongle that has it’s own port into the monitor. It can be set for gamma from 1.8 through 2.6.

They also list this as having “HDR 10 content support”, meaning it can “read” the HDR 10 media that is starting to get distributed. Realistically, for HDR creation you would need a monitor capable of supporting the wider gamut color space used in HDR work (which this can) but at something well above 600 nits, so this isn’t really designed for HDR creation work.

It has Thunderbolt3 and USB3.1 pass-throughs, and 2 HDMI inputs plus a Display-Port input. And a simple and elegant stand … very nicely designed!

With all the inputs and the very useful Thunderbolt3 and USB3.1 pass-throughs, and that wonderfully practical stand, it was very easy to add to my setup as a third monitor. And with the very handy and useful dongle/puck with a center rotating/push-knob with five surrounding buttons, setting … and setting up! … this monitor was very easy and fast.

Like most editor/colorist types whether web or broadcast, 99% of my work is still Rec.709, so that is my main concern. It has several built-in options for different display color spaces, and a dongle that is very handy to use to change the current screen space and settings.

I will cover the full details of properly evaluating and setting up a monitor in my next post. For now, I can say I’m quite pleased.

Using the BenQ PD2720U monitor for color correction or grading

I did a series of test profiles of the manufacturer settings using my i1 Display Pro Puck and the Lightspace calibration software coupled to Davinci Resolve.

Then I did a full setup and calibration on my own of the “User” mode, setting every for full broadcast standards. Video sRGB, Rec.709, gamma 2.4, at 100 nits max brightness. After that full setup and calibration, I created a profile generated again by my i1 Display Pro puck, and Lightspace calibration software combined with Resolve. The results of the full setup when profiled were quite pleasing.

This unit has a nearly dead-on gamma curve with only a very, very slight deviation up in the mid-highlights. And a DeltaE graph for color accuracy that was well under the ‘visible level’ standard of 2.2, with the only exception a very narrow small spike to 2.8 in the Red channel in the very, very darkest area. Visually … insignificant.

The screen is visually quite even (very good for a monitor of this price range) and I’m not seeing any problems with reflections or ghosting or other visual disturbances. Note, I’m in a “proper” middle-gray room with low light levels, using a MediaLight bias light on the back of the monitor. That light is metered and set to light the neutral gray wall behind the monitor to 10% of the monitor’s bright-white level, all according to broadcast standards.

For anyone viewing my video output on the web, this should “nail” the Rec.709 standard. I am quite comfortable with the results I can get.

So yes, I’m very, very pleased with this BenQ PD2720U monitor. I’ll be adding a detailed, full tech review soon, including more shots of my setup and video of this in use. And quite a number of the Lightspace profile charts for reference. That post will demonstrate how to go about testing and setting up a reference monitor for web work.

Using the BenQ PD2720U monitor for color correction or grading

Understand, I don’t currently consider this the equivalent of a full broadcast reference monitor. And I would be hesitant to send something out to a network system’s Quality Control (QC) machine for checking. But if your clientele is based in the wild-wild-web (like mine), it should work beautifully. Or, if you are in a professional environment and need a very close approximation of the screen the colorist will see, this should work quite well for you at a cost that is well below even the cheapest full broadcast reference monitor.

And after I work with it a bit more, I’ll be sending some graded material and tests on to Pat Inhofer and Robbie Carman of Mixinglight.com to test, and report how close I keep within broadcast needs using this monitor for my Reference work. I know it will work for the web … how close is it for broadcast? I don’t know. They will. And they’ve got the gear to test my results.

How close can I come to full broadcast with this monitor? I don’t know. It will do beautifully for my work for the web. And … well, it’s a very good purchase for web-based work. An excellent choice for professional editing with a full colorist suite available for final color.

Neil

Note: the gear visible in this suite are three monitors, the BenQ PD2720U “up top” as Reference monitor, over a main UI monitor, LG Ultrawide 2560×1080, with a Dell Ultrasharp U2312HM on the left. The Tangent Elements panel is my main grading control surface. And a Wacom Intuos III pen-tablet is still chugging along, with a Razer Orbweaver Chroma for macro and other button-use. In the lower right corner, you can even see the Rode SVM Video Mic on stand used for in-suite video recording.