Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware on box today I'm looking at another monitor but this one I guess it probably won't appeal to everyone who watches this channel because it's a professional-grade display from a soos we all have gaming just place you at hardware and box but we also love our productivity and for us as video editors sometimes you need to step up to a pro grade minor so you can do your work properly and accurately the monitor I'm looking at today is the asus pro art PA 32 you see - k and before you ask like a lot of professional monitors it's not cheap in fact it costs a full two thousand dollars u.s. or 3500 ozzie but before you complain about that eye watering price it could be the ultimate professional monitor and I don't say that lightly because pro grade monitors need to be top-notch quality to get a recommendation luckily the pro op PA 32 you see is packed with nearly every feature a creator might require for both SDR and HDR work we'll get to the specs in just a moment but this is a serious beast in terms of hardware before that though big share had to Asus let me bro this monitor for six weeks that was more than nine weeks ago so this review is a culmination of my thoughts from using this monitor for quite some time now I wanted to see how well it would integrate into our creative workflow as content creators and spoiler alert it does pass a lot of tests so the name Pro art PA 32 you see is pretty unassuming and doesn't really tell us anything about what this monitor is made out of in fact it sounds rather boring but this is far from a boring monitor as Seuss's packed in almost every feature you could think of it's a 32 inch 3840 by 2160 IPS panel at 60 Hertz with adaptive sync it sports 100% sRGB color space coverage 99.5% Adobe RGB and 95% DCI p3 hitting all those wide gamuts it's fully HDR compatible with a 384 zone F Ald backlight it has Thunderbolt 3 and crucially it comes with a hardware calibration tool in the box which makes getting accurate results a breeze for all buyers not just those that already have calibration tools on hand I'm not a huge fan of azusa's gaming monitor designs particularly for their rog products but the pro art pi32 you see is a completely different story this monitor is sleek and simple with thin bezels allowing the panel to dominate the front a simple silver standard with a slimmer than expected pillar and a minimalist brushed plastic rear the display section of the monitor is quite chunky to accommodate the fa LD backlight but I reckon this beast looks fantastic front on the stand is highly adjustable supporting tilt height pivot and swivel adjustment so you can use 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 there's a ton of features professionals might find useful in there some of which we'll discuss throughout the rest of the review as the inputs a suit has gone all out providing for hdmi 2.0 inputs a single DisplayPort 1.2 and 2 Thunderbolt 3 USB sea ports one for input and one for output there's also a USB 3.0 hub with two taipei ports and one type-c port so yet there's basically every modern port on this monitor and the Thunderbolt 3 port provides up to 60 watts of power delivery which should be enough to charge a lot of laptops when plugged into this beast when a professional monitor lists HDR support I expect real HDR support and that's exactly the case with the PA 32 you see there's actually surprisingly a lot of professional monitors that don't tick every box in my monitor HDR check list but this one does with a thousand nits of peak brightness and 615 it's sustained full-array local dimming with 384 zones near full DCI p3 gamut coverage and a 10 bit panel through FRC some professionals might be disappointed the panel isn't true 10 bit but the fic implementation here is actually one of the best I've seen with much much less banding than other 8-bit Plus FRC panels I've reviewed when looking at our 10 bit gradient stress test in terms of brightness accuracy the PA 32 you see gets within 10 percent of the exact nits target when viewing HDR content which is a good result the panel is capable of up to 1200 nits with the window size up to 25% after which it falls back to its 615 it's sustained value unfortunately the PA 32 you see can't produce a 1000 it full screen flash again topping out 700 nits however the backlights lowest level of just 0.012 nits is the lowest I've seen from an hgr monitor with local dimming this creates a contrast ratio up to 98,000 to 1 in best case scenarios government coverage is also around 96% DCI p3 so the monitor is capable of displaying colors well outside a normal SDR range all up this monitor has an excellent HDR implementation among the best for HDR monitors on the market right now again thanks to the 384 zone FA LD backlight the low black levels are particularly impressive with the dynamic backlight not every aspect of the HJ implementation is perfect though due to the use of an IPS panel there is a bit of glow present in some situations when only a few FA LD backlight zones are enabled in the worst-case scenario I observed a contrast ratio around 2500 to 1g this glow but visually it's a bit ugly luckily this is only a major issue when viewing thin white lines on a black background or white text on a black background in movies or games is practically invisible and for content creators not working with HDR the default behaviour is to disable the dynamic backlight so the issue goes away completely for SDR work though of course you 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 FAL D backlight response is a little slow there's a gradual fall off time of around 1 to 2 seconds for the backlight to switch off after displaying a bright image which can cause trailing in extreme fast motion like you might get in a say a dark fast-paced shooter with bright gun flashes for example I'd have liked to see perhaps a faster backlight option like a soos provides with a gaming grade PG 27 UQ but from what I observe a video work this is a non-issue response times for the PA 32 you see are typical for an IPS panel I recorded a seven point one eight millisecond greater great average while a soos reports 5 milliseconds there are six overdrive modes the DeSousa lists as trace free in the settings the default 60 setting introduces a small amount of overshoot that exceeds our testing threshold so I reduced it to 40 which cleared that problem right up 5 millisecond response times are totally within the realm of possibility at high overdrive modes but the overshoot becomes unacceptable in any case an average response of 7.2 milliseconds for a non gaming IPS display is decent it's faster than a typical VA panel and well under the 16.6 millisecond refresh window the main issue with the PA 32 you see is input lag which is very poor and nearly 60 milliseconds of lag in our standard test mode this monitor is the slowest I've tested and I couldn't find an OSD setting that improves upon this result when you combine this input lag with the standard 60 Hertz refresh rate the monitor does feel a little sluggish to use again considering response times themselves are still good the issue with input lag only really impacts gaming it didn't have any material effect on content creation work I've been doing on the panel over the last few months or watching things like TV shows or movies color accuracy is obviously a big part of how professional monitors should perform so it's great to see a soos providing an X right by one display Pro in the box with the PA 32 you see - K this allows anyone buying this monitor to calibrate it continually over its lifespan so that it remains accurate initially and for years to come this isn't some niche edition in fact in my opinion this is the key selling point to the PA 32 you see but it gets better than just having a color emitter in the box through the use of a Seuss's pro art calibration software tool you can generate color accurate profiles and save them to the monitor this is an absolute godsend for content credits because software profiles you set within windows can only get you so far it's not every application supports or adheres to basic ICC profiles with the PA 32 you see you can basically ignore software profiles altogether and just save the profile directly into the monitors firmware then you can not only use your exact calibrated profile with your main PC but with any device you hook up to the monitor including those that don't allow software side calibration like a blu-ray player game console or say a chromecast the pro art calibration software is super easy to use you can set your color space brightness gamma and white point targets then you just plug in the I 1 display Pro to the monitor the tool gets to work and you can save your profile into one of the two User Profile slots having two slots is also important because you can then have an accurate srgb Pro and an accurate DCI p3 profile for example allowing you to switch between them whenever you're working with wide gamut content or not a soos own software isn't as accurate as spectra Cal's camera and five that we normally use for display calibration but it still gets the PA 32 you see to a point that content credit should be happy with when calibrating to srgb I was able to achieve a grayscale Delta e below 2.0 decent enough white balance good gamma and both saturation and color checker Delta averages around that 1.0 mark which is basically dead accurate combined with 99.5% srgb coverage and that's a fantastic result for color accurate work especially as this profile is saved directly to the display itself and you can recalibrate the monitor as many times as you like over the lifespan of the display for DCI p3 calibrated results weren't quite as accurate for grayscale with a bit of wonkiness to the CCT curve however color performance was still very accurate with Delta II averages of 1.07 and one point two to four saturation and color checker tests respectively so after running the isuzu wizard with the tool provider in the Box you can quite easily send accurate srgb and wide gamut profiles to the monitor which is exactly what you want from a professional-grade monitor those who want to even greater levels of accuracy which probably isn't necessary unless you have strict Delta II standards of sub 1.0 for perfect accuracy you can use Kalman 5 to create software profile which could be used in conjunction with the on display profile through extreme accuracy and as you might expect here we were able to create a very accurate profile with essentially no issues there are a few other reasons why having the calibration tools provided is great for buyers there are lots of professional-grade monitors out there they come with profiles calibrated at the factory including the PA 32 you see which definitely gets you part of the way there but often these profiles come with restrictions for example the PA 32 uses factory srgb mode there is no way to change the brightness level you're stuck at 165 nits using the calibration tools allows you to set a brightness target yourself and monitor accuracy does degrade over time so factory calibration will be less accurate a year after you purchased the monitor again the included calibration tool means you can continually ensure the display is accurate calibration also allows you to correct errors with factory calibration in the case of the PA 32 you see the default factory srgb mode uses a 7500 K white point target rather than the correct 6500 K this is a bit bizarre for a professional monitor targeting srgb and if the calibration tools weren't provided I'd definitely slam a soos for this mistake because the factory profile is not accurate but when the tools are there I'd recommend and I would even expect anyone purchasing this display for professional use will perform a calibration after taking it out of the box which corrects the problem and really makes it less of an issue the final area of performance I want to look at is uniformity again this is an area as soos allows you to calibrate using their pro art calibration software which is unique because calibrating uniformity is often very difficult aside from these sorts of tools naturally I'd recommend buyers use the uniformity calibration tool straight out of the box alongside a full color calibration however even with a uniformity calibration results are a little weak for a professional-grade display it's definitely good overall especially in the center of the display but for a pro grade monitor and what the entire screen reporting with the sub 2.0 Delta II relative to the center some outer areas are up over 3.0 and I suspect this is partially down to the fal d backlight getting an even result out of this sort of backlight is certainly quite tricky I guess the disappointing thing here is uniformity is actually worse for this monitor compared to the gaming grade a soprano 2 X 27 which also uses a 384 so an FA LD backlight that monitor also features better factory calibration though it doesn't support some of the calibration features I've been talking about throughout this review so it's probably not suitable for most professionals so at the start of this review I talked about the PA 32 you see as the ultimate professional monitor and that's for a couple of reasons this display provides pro-grade calibration features with the tools you need provided in the box combined with high-end display hardware particularly for HDR the PA 32 you see provides everything you need for accurate srgb work accurate wide gamut work and HDR work and it's not fake HDR we're talking genuine full-blown HDR with great brightness elite contrast and proper color support asus is doing this with a 32 display which right now is unique there are some pro great when seven-inch HDR monitors with a similar feature set like Dells u P 27:18 Q but at a smaller size and I tend to think 32 inches is a bit better for 4k work right now the U P 27:18 Q is cheaper though so it is something to consider those looking for just an entertainment or gaming display with HDR shouldn't opt for the PA 32 you see though that should be obvious considering this Pro out display is toggling professionals not gamers the Acer predator X 27 provides a similar feature set with great factory calibration and a higher 144 Hertz refresh rate with chasing HDR for the same price at the pier 32 you see those who want to do both creative work and gaming on the one display chaucer up for the X 27 in my opinion unless you know professional work is really what you want the monitor for but if you're in the market for a proper 32 inch HDR display for content creation productivity or other professional work I definitely recommend the PA 32 you see and I've been loving using this for my video production workflow over the last weeks and months that's not to say it's perfect input lag is a concern uniformity isn't quite where I wanted to be despite the uniformity calibration feature the factory calibrated profiles are a little off and contrast without the dynamic backlight enabled is only me seven hundred to one when calibrated but most of these issues are only minor for productivity work of course the final question is whether you should spend $2,000 on a monitor because that certainly sounds like a lot of money however most pro grade monitors started around the $1,000 mark so when you put that in perspective the $2,000 price of this 32 inch 4k panel with proper HDR doesn't sound as outrageous unlike the gaming grade PG 27 UQ which is more than triple the price of a good gaming display Dells 32 inch 4k non HDR wide gamut professional-grade u P 32 16 Q is 1400 US dollars for example and that price goes up by 260 dollars if you want the color calibration tool included with it so that kind of gives you an idea of where the PA 32 you see sits and for $2000 it's certainly not an outrageous price anyway the PA 32 use has been great for my workflow in the performance numbers included calibration tool and hardware capabilities of this panel just add to the package that's it for this review let us know what monitors you want us to check out in the comments below we're always looking for suggestions as there are so many monitors out there on the market consider subscribing for more monitor content we have a patreon page as well where you can access our exclusive discord chat through there and I'll catch you in the next one