Asus ProArt PA32QCV

I’ll cut to the chase: it’s a nice resolution upgrade from an Apple or LG 5k display. But that’s about it – in every other visual respect (brightness, contrast, etc) it’s basically the same or marginally worse (see Matte-ugly). Though the built-in KVM is a nice addition.

Resolution

The extra resolution is significant – it is 38% more pixels – and welcome, but it’s not revolutionary. It feels like what should have just been the natural progression and not a big deal – in the same way we started with 9″ sub-VGA displays and have over decades worked our way up to bigger and higher-resolution ones.

And in that vein, the prospect of downgrading back to a 5k display is immediately deeply unappealing (pay attention, Apple 😠). The notion of going down to a mere 4k display is absurd (tempting as bright[er] OLEDs are1).

Dimness (née Brightness)

Even though it’s supposedly brighter than the LG UltraFine 5K it’s replacing for me – at least at peak, given its DisplayHDR 600 rating – it really isn’t. For everyday work (coding etc) I had the LG set at 50% brightness (so nominally 250 nits, given its 500 peak rating) but the equivalent brightness requires ~75% on the Asus. Which actually fits if you take the Asus’s manual (not its tech specs) at its word of a 350 nominal max brightness, since 250 nits is roughly 75% of 350.

So that’s disappointing. The LG UltraFine 5K was sort of bright for its day, but that day was nearly a decade ago. We now have cheap laptops with 1000-nit displays, so 500 is unequivocally dim now.

Not that I expected much else – while Asus can’t seem to agree with themselves over the actual peak brightness, they never claim more than 400, so going in I suspected it would be dim. What I didn’t expect was that the claims of multiple reviewers, that it’s actually closer to 700, would turn out to be completely false.

The one thing that makes a difference in practice, in the Asus’s favour over some older displays like the LG, is that it supports HDR mode. So you ca…