Similar a lot of professional monitors, the Asus ProArt PA32UC does not come cheap at $2,000. And yet, it could be the ultimate professional person monitor and I don't say that lightly. Pro-course monitors need to exist tiptop-notch quality to go a recommendation, and the PA32UC is packed with virtually every feature a creator might crave for both SDR and HDR work. Nosotros'll become to the specs and output performance in just a moment, just for now know this is a serious beast in terms of hardware.

It should be mentioned that Asus let me borrow this monitor for several weeks, so this review is the culmination of my thoughts from using information technology and integrating it into our creative workflow for quite some fourth dimension now.

Asus has packed in almost every feature yous could call back of in the ProArt PA32UC. Information technology's a 32-inch 3840 x 2160 IPS panel at sixty Hz with Adaptive Sync, it sports 100% sRGB color infinite coverage, 99.5% Adobe RGB and 95% DCI-P3, hitting all those wide gamuts. Information technology's fully HDR uniform with a 384-zone FALD backlight, information technology has Thunderbolt three, and crucially, it comes with a hardware calibration tool in the box which makes getting accurate results a breeze for all buyers, non simply those that already take scale tools on manus.

I'g not a big fan of Asus' previous gaming monitor designs, particularly their ROG line, just the ProArt is a completely different story. Sleek and simple lines, thin bezels allowing the panel to boss the forepart, a simple silver stand with a slimmer than expected colonnade, and a minimalist brushed plastic rear. The display section of the monitor is quite mesomorphic to accommodate the FALD backlight but I reckon this animal looks fantastic front-on.

The stand is highly adjustable, supporting tilt, height, pivot and swivel adjustment, so yous can apply the monitor in a portrait orientation if you need to. The on-screen display is controlled by a directional toggle which is great to see, and at that place's a ton of features professionals might find useful in in that location, some of which we'll discuss throughout the rest of the review.

As for inputs, Asus provides four HDMI 2.0 inputs, a single DisplayPort 1.2, and two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, one for input and one for output. There's also a USB 3.0 hub with ii blazon-A ports and one blazon-C port. So yeah, there's basically every modern port on this monitor. Oh, and the Thunderbolt iii port provides up to 60W of power commitment which should exist enough to charge a lot of laptops when plugged in to this beast.

When a professional monitor lists HDR support, I expect existent HDR support, and that'southward exactly the instance with the PA32UC. This monitor ticks every box in my HDR monitor checklist, with k nits of peak brightness, effectually 650 nits sustained, full array local dimming with 384 zones, almost total DCI-P3 gamut coverage, and a x-bit panel through FRC.

Some professionals might be disappointed the panel isn't true 10-scrap, but the FRC implementation is i of the best I've seen with much, much less banding than other 8-bit+FRC panels I've reviewed when looking at our x-bit gradient stress test.

In terms of brightness accurateness, the PA32UC gets inside ten% of the exact nit target when viewing HDR content, which is a skilful effect. The panel is capable of up to 1200 nits with a window size upward to 25%, after which it falls back to its 650 nit sustained value. Unfortunately the PA32UC tin can't produce a m nit total screen flash, over again topping out around 700 nits. However the backlight's everyman level of just 0.012 nits is the lowest I've seen from an HDR monitor with local dimming. This creates a contrast ratio up to 98,000:1 in best case scenarios. Gamut coverage is too around 96% DCI-P3 so the monitor is capable of displaying colors well outside a normal SDR range.

All up, this monitor has an fantabulous HDR implementation, amidst the best for HDR monitors on the market right now, again thanks to the 384-zone FALD backlight. The low black levels are particularly impressive with the dynamic backlight.

Not every aspect of the HDR implementation is perfect though, due to the use of an IPS console, there is a bit of glow nowadays in some situations when only a few FALD backlight zones are enabled. In the worst case scenario I observed a contrast ratio around 2500:i due to this glow, merely visually it's a bit ugly. Luckily this is simply a major issue when viewing thin white lines on a black background, or white text on a black background, in movies or games it'south practically invisible. And for content creators not working with HDR, the default behaviour is to disable the dynamic backlight then the consequence goes away completely for SDR work, though y'all can enable the feature for SDR work if you want to.

I would say, though, that this particular HDR monitor isn't suitable for HDR gaming, because the FALD backlight response is a footling tedious. In that location's a gradual fall-off time of around 1-2 seconds for the backlight to switch off after displaying a bright epitome, which can cause trailing in extreme fast motion like you might get in a night fast paced shooter with bright gun flashes, for example. I'd have liked to see perhaps a faster backlight option, like Asus provides with their gaming-course PG27UQ. From what I observed for video work, it'due south a non-issue.

I should also mention there are 2 HDR modes, annoyingly labelled HDR 1 and HDR ii that provide no information into what they practice. Nevertheless the default HDR two is the manner to become with, switching to HDR 1 seems to simply cap brightness output to around 350 nits.

On the adjacent page we get deeper into testing the ProArt'due south response times, input lag and calibrated sRGB performance. Or if y'all want to skip all that, go to our decision to learn who this monitor is all-time suited for.