Colour Accuracy.

Colour accuracy is something that I have always had to dabble with while editing my photos and videos. As a photographer and filmmaker, there were many instances where an edit I thought looked good on my monitor came out looking so different when printed, or viewed on other devices. When BenQ reached out to me I was super excited to be able to work on an industry level colour calibrated monitor, the SW321C. 

Out of the box.

Colour Calibrated straight out of the box, I was very impressed with how serious BenQ takes their promises. The monitor comes with an individual calibration report for the unit that details everything from uniformity measurement results, delta E information, colour Gamut, DICOM result and even a colour Gamma curve. This report is unique to the particular unit that I have received and BenQ carries out individualized tests for every SW321C that they produce. I can’t deny that reading this report gave me the sense of assurance that I will be editing on an absolute beast of a machine. The SW321C is also CalMAN Verified and Pantone Validated ensuring that professionals are getting industry-approved performance out of the monitor.

Hardware Calibration.

For professionals out there that want to further calibrate their monitors, the BenQ Palette Master Element software is compatible with a wide variety of hardware calibration tools such as X-Rite il Display Pro, Spyder X and ColorMunki Photo just to name a few. Palette Master Element assists hardware calibration for users that want to fine tune the monitor’s colour output to produce results that might be more stylized to their own preferences. Definitely a useful tool if you ask me. An interesting feature that I found while browsing around was the function to calibrate in basic mode for beginners, as well as an advanced mode for users that want more precise adjustments. 

The monitor itself was easy to set up and came in a few individual parts that I had to piece together. The build quality of the monitor is super sturdy with minimal buttons for efficient workflow. I had the SW321C connected to my iMac Pro through USB-C which is only one of the many connections that the SW321C provides. The process of setting up the SW321C to my iMac Pro was easy and the only problem that I had was finding space on my desk to fit all 32 inches of the monitor (time to get a bigger desk :D) The SW321C also comes with a few shading hoods which I will elaborate later on, as well as an external remote what BenQ calls a hotkey puck.

The hotkey puck resembles a hockey puck which has a dial in the center to scroll through menu settings as well as 5 buttons. The numbers on the hotkey puck can be customized to switch between colour spaces or other menu options. I found this extremely useful when I had to switch between sRGB while editing photos on Lightroom to Rec.709 while colour grading on Davinci Resolve.

AQCOLOR.

The SW321C boasts AQCOLOR technology with a wide gamut space of 99% Adobe RGB / 95% DCI-P3 & Display P3 as well as 100% sRGB. In layman terms, the monitor is an absolute beast when it comes to colour rendition and is able to produce a wide spectrum of colours within each colour space. Having a bit depth on 10-Bit, the SW321C has no issues creating smooth colour transitions of the different tones in my images which is a very common issue amongst consumer level LCD displays. Brightness and Colour Uniformity throughout the 32” of the LCD display was something that I found really useful. Colour grading larger format content such as short films or landscape photos was not an issue knowing that the SW321C had no vignetting or fading colours towards the edges that would hinder my workflow. 

Hardware Specs.

Now lets talk a little about the hardware of the SW321C. The SW321C is height adjustable within 150mm with a swivel angle of 45 degrees on each side. Another really interesting function of the monitor was it being able to flip into a portrait orientation. The shading hoods that came along with the SW321C caters to a landscape and portrait orientation. Setting up the shading hood was straightforward with just a couple of pieces to put together and they click nicely onto the sides of the monitor. The shading hoods were really effective at keeping out stray glares from external light sources even editing during the day in my bedroom. 

One of the functions that I was unable to test out but I’m sure would come in really handy to a lot of professional photographers is Paper Color Sync Technology. Paper color sync allows you to simulate printing results by selecting the colour gamut of the photo, printer model and paper type to get an accurate preview of how your images would look like when printed. In the past, sending my photos to print and selling them was such a hassle as I had to do multiple test prints whenever sending to different printing labs as the results on screen to paper would differ drastically. Having this tool would definitely save me a lot of time and money knowing exactly how my photos would turn out on paper. 

Paper Color Sync.