Review BenQ SW2700PT Best Calibration Monitor for Photo Editing

The controls available are vast maybe a few too many in fact. Some of the color modes will have certain settings greyed out and cannot be selected as they are locked by default. There are two forms of customised settings you can save out. The first is; two separate calibration settings. What this means is, customised settings which then are hardware calibrated to which creates a LUT in the monitor and an ICC profile for those settings. You cannot name them, so note the settings for the calibrations 1 or 2. The 2nd customisable settings is custom set ups not necessarily requiring hardware calibrations. This may be useful for video editing or colour matching specific applications such as paper matching, or logo colours and or video, gaming in fact anything outside of calibrated and profiled image editing applications.

The user guide details the BenQ SW2700PT well all the options. Only the Standard and Photo setting are not detailed. I found Standard to be brightness 90 at gamma 2.2 and Photo brightness 100 gamma 2.0. Since I strongly suggest using hardware calibration for any serious editing these two settings are redundant.

Factory calibration is very good to start with. The monitor is supplied with a printed factory certification report showing the how serious BenQ is on quality assurance. While each monitor leaves calibrated, which makes the presets AdobeRGB and sRGB excellent target spaces, each computer will have slightly different video card output. To truly optimise your display you must hardware calibrate.

For new to colour management and hardware calibration users the Basic mode will lead you through the steps in a fast efficient manner. In Palette Master Elements thus far the user settings are what is needed but nothing beyond. For example, while calibrating you cannot limit gamma for a calibrated state to sRGB. Although the factory calibration is effectively at the highest level of accuracy, for many running the monitor on the factory calibrated state with the sRGB setting should suffice, there will still be the inherent differences between operating systems and video card output, hence hardware calibration will optimise for the computer side of the equation.

The ideal set up for image editing will be around 150-160 cd/m2 at 6500K at L* gamma. Unless you work with press or a lot of print media these settings will be optimised for this monitor. I have always preferred a lower brightness yet below 150cd/m2 introduces more maximum ∆E especially in the grey scale. This is common on the later wide gamut high contrast monitors. You could effectively (as I have) make a second calibration at a lower brightness such as 120cd/m2, save this as calibration 2 just remember to switch ICC profiles if swapping calibrations 1<>2.

One thing to note is even though it is shown on the Quick Guide, you must plug the device into the panel usb hub not directly into a free computer port. It would be nice if an alert would come up if not plugged in to the panel port. I also tried to calibrate with an i1 Display unfortunately the device even when connected ( shown via the Calibrite alerts) is not found.

There are some anomalies yet nothing drastic. The first is after you click start you will need to calibrate the device. This panel is hidden until after you click start measurement. The instrument zeroing calibration is long and it is not clear if you can proceed or not. Give it time the measurement window will eventually come up. When it does, you have the placement image over the measurement plane. Strangely enough after you place your device you’d expect it to turn off the placement image when you click next. It actually writes out a LUT before measurements begin at which point the placement image is removed. This is in fact showing the measurement progress bar while in fact no measurements occur. The write out time of the LUT is very long which will keep you wondering. There is no automatic measurement window detection either nor full screen upon measurement. Be precise in your placement, make sure your screen saver is turned off, and do not disturb the process by doing anything on a secondary screen.

The measurements progress well albeit slowly until what seems to be a cache problem around 80-84% where there is a long pause. After that everything goes smoothly. When measurements are complete, the adjusted LUT is written out, and a target vs measured report is shown. Nice touch with the profile naming as by default naming brightness and temperature where you can easily modify the default naming. The calibrations are labelled SW2700 1_ D65 temperature standard, Luminosity set then the date. If you change the number following the SW2700 to the calibration number and the actual colour temperature set you’ll know which profile corresponds to which calibration. Your settings before creating the calibration can be named and saved out, for example MyBenQ 6000K L* 100cd to have this as a preset for future calibrations. The entire calibration takes around 12 minutes.

If you want to further validate the new LUT/profile combination it is much faster as no LUT is written. Since the process is easy you can go back to the home button, change to calibration2 with the OSD, change your settings and repeat the process. Upon quitting the application I have the Unexpectedly Quit warning, yet it has no effect on the profile or calibration. The validation window is a bit confusing too as the selectors for Matrix or LUT profiles, version level, small patch set-large, etc. are still shown whilst you cannot change the validation after the creation of the calibration and profile. The only thing you can select for validation is Average ∆E and Maximum ∆E which range the error reporting pass or fail within the range set.

Note: the HDMI input source if used with an adapter may or may not have the screen options of full range rub values. The menu bars are also non standard in ElCapitan showing as full gamut icons, bright and colourful but unexpected. This is with a 4kx2k adapter from mini display to HDMI. The only sound through the display’s headphone jack that works. Display port doesn’t seem to pass sound through.

When playback is on mini HDMI to HDMI coming from a Canon 5DMKIII, the playback has some jittery lines happening. The colour on playback is fine, and live view works very well. Strange that there is some scan line jitters on playback mode only. Cable used is quite long, perhaps this has something to do with it.