Built into the giant display chassis are two 5-watt speakers. They aren't very good. The volume output is extremely weak - I had to crank up the PC sound to about 75 percent just to make out dialogue in a movie trailer - and the sound that came out was tinny and echoey. Watching the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War, the sweeping cinematic score was horribly weak. Big orchestral hits had no impact, and dialogue sounded lousy. Thanos' deep, gravelly voice sounded like someone speaking through a tin can, and Tony Stark sounded like his voice was echoing down a hallway. This 27in IPS monitor supports a rudimentary form of HDR: it’s not exactly going to blow your mind, but we noticed an improvement in colour vibrancy all the same. It also supports AMD FreeSync technology for reducing screen tearing when gaming. These things are noteworthy simply because they aren’t commonly found on office monitors; if you’re a casual gamer with a good rig that you’ve ended up reluctantly using very often for work, the 279C9 caters for you. There are also a few unexpected options. There's the Bright Screen mode, which lets you highlight one quadrant of the panel when running it as a four-screen multi-monitor display, literally highlighting one of the four feeds. Unfortunately, it applies only to input coming from the PC, and can't be used to highlight one screen from among multiple sources.

Overdrive boost mode was the worst culprit, but with medium settings enabled I found it to be totally playable. Outside of the panel’s performance, the EW2880U continues to impress. It has a decent selection of ports: two HDMI 2.0 ports and a DP 1.4 port for video and a USB-C port capable of delivering 60W of power and carrying a video signal at the same time. Great for owners of modern MacBooks in particular. The stand, meanwhile, offers height adjustment plus a small amount of swivel and tilt – not spectacular but good enough for most people However, if you need to execute colour-critical tasks, such as colour grading videos or editing images, you need to make sure that the monitor displays the colours correctly. Without a proper calibration, colours might be displayed in different hues on other displays. For instance, what you see as a true red in your digital creation might be displayed as more of a pink or orange on another person’s display – assuming their monitor shows accurate colours. In short, without calibrating, the colours displayed might not be true and therefore make colour-sensitive jobs unnecessarily complicated.monitors with VA LCD panels tend to have great contrast and good colours but much higher response times and poor viewing angles. They can also exhibit higher than average amounts of motion blur when gaming, due to slow pixel response times. USB-C ports can also charge connected devices, with maximum power delivery ranging from 10W to 45W depending on the product. If you plan on connecting to your new screen via a Windows laptop or a MacBook with few to no USB-A ports, consider looking out for a monitor with a USB hub (with at least two USB-A ports) for mice, keyboards or external drives. There were some issues with overdrive mode worth noting. I found inverse ghosting occurred increasingly as I moved up through the higher overdrive settings. The BenQ EW2880U is a multipurpose 4K monitor with a comparatively low price tag. For the money, you’re getting a 28in IPS panel with a 60Hz refresh rate, a 5ms response time and AMD FreeSync support. The EW2280U performed well on test, producing 114% of the sRGB colour gamut with strong accuracy and achieving brightness and contrast results that lined up very neatly with BenQ’s claims (300cd/m² and 987:1 respectively). These final figures don’t exactly make for great HDR, but as the monitor has no official HDR certification this is only a small niggle There’s plenty of colour available with gamut volumes of 163.3% sRGB, 112.5% Adobe RGB, and 115.7% DCI-P3 while the Delta E variance scores of 1.2 vs DCI-P3 and 1.6 vs AdobeRGB are professional grade. With two HDMI 2.0 and one DisplayPort 1.4 video input, four USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 1 data ports, two Thunderbolt 4 / USB-C 4 ports, and a gigabit RJ45 LAN port, the Philips is very well connected. Is it worth two grand? Absolutely.

This unassuming 27in panel is brimming with features that combine to create the most well-rounded 4K monitor we’ve ever tested. From a technical perspective, this is an IPS panel that refreshes at 75Hz. It performed well on test, producing 95% of the sRGB colour gamut with good accuracy; DCI-P3 reproduction was a little less than advertised but at 87% remains pretty good for a non-professional monitor.Our verdict is simple: if you have money to blow on a gaming monitor, and you’d prefer to play your next-gen console on a smaller (but no less impressive) screen, buy the Asus ROG Swift PG32UQ.