BenQ PD2705Q
For creatives who work in sRGB or Rec.709, this is nothing short of a bargain
SCORE
PRICE £316 (£379 inc VAT) from shop.benq.eu
Not every creative professional can afford to spend over £1,000 on a monitor, but BenQ reckons it has the answer in the PD2705Q: a hardware-calibrated display with the assurance that even screens from different production lines will output consistent colours. Each monitor comes with its own calibration report and the promise of an average Delta E of under three, plus certification from CalMAN and Pantone.
What you don’t get is coverage of the Adobe RGB gamut, so print designers need not apply, but if your work is within the sRGB or Rec.709 gamuts then you’ll be happy: the PD2705Q achieved stellar scores of 96.2% coverage/98% volume with a 0.47 average Delta E, while you can widen its gamut by switching to Standard mode where it reached figures of 99.2%, 114.4% and 0.28.
If you connect over USB-C or USB-B, you can take advantage of BenQ’s Display Pilot software. This gives control over simple things such as brightness, rather than go through the clunky OSD, along with more advanced tools such as automatically associating colour modes with different applications.
An USB-C output means you can daisy-chain two monitors together, and theoretically you could make it three screens; the main USB-C connection provides 65W of power to the host laptop.
Video editors should note that there’s no VESA DisplayHDR 400 certification, but support for HDR10 means you can get a good idea of how content looks before you press “Export”. You won’t see the full brightness levels because the panel isn’t capable of it: our sample peaked at 327cd/m2, and even that is well beyond the typical 300cd/m2 peak brightness that BenQ promises.
BenQ supplies a flexible stand to ma tch this flexible monitor, with support for pivoting and 120mm of height adjustment, and for the price we can forgive minor annoyances such as the four USB-A ports being placed around the back of the monitor. Nor can we expect 4K. We don’t recommend this screen for everyone, but it’s terrific value for its target audience.