ASUS ProArt Display 32” 4K HDR Computer Monitor (PA32UCG-K) - UHD (3840 x 2160), Mini-LED IPS, 1600nits, 120Hz, 10-bit, Thunderbolt 3, HDMI2.1, w/Calibrator, Compatible With Laptop & Mac Monitor,Black

Writing a review due to a rather strange lack of reviews out there for the PA32UCR-K. It blows my mind this particular model has not been reviewed more.Anyway I grade HDR video and use a 13" M1 iPad Pro with XDR and a 14" MBP with XDR displays at 1600 nits. Wonderful HDR displays for grading but they are small. I didn't want to get an Apple Pro Display for $6,000 and have it limited in what it could connect to. So I took a chance n the Asus PA32UCR-K since there are very few comments on using it for HDR grading and editing.The short: Buy this damn thing now!The long: Buy this damn thing now! Seriously I could not have asked for a better compliment to my smaller XDR displays. the built in HDR standards, the HDR calibration, the 1200 nits, the 87% rec2020 color is all worth every single penny.Sure it's not 1600 nits like my XDR displays but so far I find the Asus PA32UCR-K to sustain 1200 nits very well. Even way above 50% coverage I have not noticed the brightness dip down very much. It all depends how you hook it up. MacOS HDR mode is a bit non standard and seems to limit the display to about 700 nits. Maybe I'm doing something wrong yet. Hooking it up to a BMD video output device for a proper HDR signal however reaches the displays full potential. Even throwing a solid white color on the output and increasing the brightness looks like I'm sustaining about 1200 nits. I have not done a super accurate measurement yet and just eye balling what my scopes read until I no longer see it get brighter. Basically I'm super impressed. I also run both my XDR displays in 1000 nit DCI mode so if the Asus is in fact sustaining 100% 1000 nits thats a perfect match.The color on the Asus PA32UCR-K is mind blowing. I'm seeing reds that are just not possible on any other display. Sad thing is I'm now limiting the Asus PA32UCR-K to HDR PQ DCI mode to match the P3 color of the XDR displays. Accuracy first.Now the elephant in the room. The 576 local dimming zone blooming. Yeah so what. All mini LEDs bloom. Even my 2048 local dimming zone XDR displays. This topic is way over exaggerate and I find blooming a much smaller compromise than OLED. I'm frankly baffled so many think OLED is superior. Its not. Just because you have blooming doesn't mean you can't grade HDR. Anyone experienced should know what the black levels would really be and not be influenced by the blooming. Honestly I hardly notice it on either of my HDR displays. I have a lot of HDR displays as well. A Samsung 1500 nit 50" TV, A Vizio 500 nit 65" TV with 83% rec2020 color, Two XDR displays, Now the Asus 1200 nits display, a LG 32" 350 nit display and a small portable 400 nit 13" OLED. I hardly ever notice blooming compared to the OLED in any real life material. The only shots I ever see blooming are space scenes or Disney+ title screens on a solid black background with a lot of glow. The glow throws off the blooming. Anyway it's grossly over exaggerated. Yeah it's there but it takes a sliver of imagination and understanding to not let it get in the way. OLED has its own negative issues like crappy brightness and dimming of static content to reduce image retention and burn in. It's completely unpredictable and all over the place. Plus tone mapping down to 200 nits kills colors and values in skin and other normal ranges in video and I find that to be completely worthless for grading.Dimming zones are kind of like megapixels as well and you need 4k the amount to really have a decent impact on the blooming. Even then it's there no matter what you do. 576 local dimming zones could divide the width of the screen into 24 zones. I say could because I don't know the exact shape of each zone on each display. I'm using simple math where it can be 24x24 zones. 1152 zones on the $3,400 Asus display is only 34x34 zones. While better and slightly smaller the blooming is still there. Even my 2048 zones XDR displays are only about 48x48 regions. Better yet but still clearly they're around the edges. Nothing will get rid of blooming. Even if Apple jumped up to over 8,000 local dimming zones (96x96) thats still clearly visible zones around bright objects on black. Even dividing a screen into 96 regions across still uses 40 pixels wide zones. Again thats much smaller but it's still there.We always want as many zones as we can get but don't let the 1152 zone $3,400 Asus fool you into thinking it's worth 3x the cost of the 576 zone Asus PA32UCR-K. Don't get me wrong I would have loved the $3,400 model instead but I just couldn't justify that cost right now.A few others thing missing from the highest end $3,400 Asus. 144hz vs 60hz. Yeah to some gamers thats a big deal. Personally I have always gamed at 60hz and I love it. Jedi Fallen Order, Diablo 3, Witcher 3 and too many other time sucks I'm guilty of to list all look great at 60p. Still I get it and some competitive games want 144hz. Honestly I would question using a grading display for that. Seriously get the Asus PA32UCR-K for grading and color critical work and a gaming 144hz 4k display for that. Wear out the cheaper display first and save the expensive display for what matters. Innocen makes some killer HDR 32" panels now that are still visually great but cost much less to game open and wear out vs $3,400.The Asus PA32UCR-K also lacks Dolby Vision which was something I factored but honestly I'm perfectly fine working with HDR10 and, puke, HLG. Maybe someday I will specifically need Dolby Vision. I can still create Dolby Vision with a bit more guess work. For now I don't need it however so I'm fine spending 1/3 the amount. I personally find the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ situation a bit frustrating anyway. I prefer to stick with HDR10 as a universal standard.The Accuracy compared to my XDR displays is stunning. Yes it works perfectly fine with MacOS. Those that say it does not do not know what they are doing or just hates Macs. It is the perfect complement to the XDR displays. This is also the only solution I know of to calibrate for HDR without buying special $2,000 software. That may not matter to casual users but it really matters to me. No I'm not talking about the crude manual HDR calibration tool Windows 11 has to set brightness an contrast. That does nothing for the color. Thats not even calibration. It's a contrast helper tool.I have used calibration hardware on displays for a long time and they are currently really limited in calibrating color for HDR. The hardware is capable but the software is greatly lacking. Plus using a computer profile for calibration is not always optimal and it's better to have the calibration on the display itself.The Asus PA32UCR-K so far has been worth every single penny. Would gladly buy a second one its that good. I will likely hold off however and wait to see what we get in a few years or just get one of the new HDR models coming out of China at 144hz if I ever decide to get into higher FPS gaming. I really only need my video output display to have perfect HDR so I don't need a second one just yet.One last point about the 4k vs Apple 6k. It doesn't bother me at all just like using a 4k 27" vs the 27" 5k iMacs. I use my 32" displays with Mac scaling at 3008 wide (6016) or essentially the same 6k as the Apple Pro Display. Don't believe the hype and myth that it impacts performance. It does not. Only like a 1% hit on resources. A frame buffer is designed to handle resizing with hardly any hit on the system. In terms of quality its stil retina. Maybe not 2x retina and more like 1.5x retina but still retina. The visual difference is almost non existent and totally worth spending $1,200 vs $6,000.

This is a wonderful monitor with beautiful color and an excellent value. It's made nicely with big and fully adjustable stand that even lets you rotate monitor vertically. (I used to think I wanted something like that.). The color is vibrant out of the box, and you can set either sRGB or Rec 709 standards. (I use the latter as it's most video compatible and I think it has the widest dynamic range. Also I can set my mac computer to Rec 709.). However, I don't think the calibration was fully accurate. Mine had a slight green tint (I see others complaining about this) and I fixed it by setting tint at 43 (-7) and it should be noted the adjustment ticks are very small. That seems just about right but I plan to do my own full calibration(s) on this and all my other monitors with a colorimeter I just got. I had a different Pro-Art monitor before and it seemed exactly correct out of the box.

Monitor is showing great colors. Easy setup and no guessing to see if I'm calibrated correctly or now. Highly recommend for a more cost effective true to color, monitor.

It is an exceptional monitor with incredible color and retina melting HDR. I'm a Graphic Designer who's mainly focused on print media, so color accuracy is important to me. I also love to game (more on this later). I wanted to dip my toes into working with true HDR content and this was one the lower priced points of entry. Since I only have space for one display and I spend 6-8 hours a day with static content on the screen, buying an OLED was not an option. I also wanted a true HDR 1000 monitor and this delivers. My previous monitor was a 27" 4K Acer with a 10 bit (8 bit + FRC) panel and a respectable brightness. Unfortunately that monitor didn't handle motion the best in spite of being advertised as having a 5ms response time and it always had image retention that eventually become too much of an issue as it aged. I was also worried about the lower PPI of jumping to 32" from 27" would be a bummer. I'm happy to say that it's still plenty sharp, especially for vector work.As other's have noted, there is zero instructions in the box. There's some warranty information, and the factory calibration report, and that's it. In spite of that, setup was easy and straightforward, however seating the display port cable into it's socket was oddly difficult. The orientation of the ports on the back face downwards making accessing them and seeing them a pain. Thankfully you can rotate the monitor into a portrait position, albeit clunkily, which makes the ports easier to access. There's a vanity panel to cover the ports, which pops off under little force, so if you plan to regularly rotate the monitor, just leave it off. There's also only one full size display port.The menu system is okay, but the controls are on the back, which is a little frustrating when swapping color modes. The controls are also located right above it's internal power supply and when in HDR, there is a significant amount of heat being evacuated. Not a big deal, but worth mentioning.The build quality of the display and the build quality of the stand feel like they were made by two different companies. It's not an ugly monitor by far, but the chassis feels cheap and thin. Thankfully there's no audio resonance from my studio monitors placed near it (which I now need to relocate). The stand is an absolute tank and weighs more than the entire monitor it replaced. What does really bother me is the cheek at the bottom of the monitor. It sits a good couple of millimeters from the screen and will invariably be a dirt trap. I had to fish packing material out of this space after unboxing it.The display itself, well it's a mixed bag. In standard dynamic range, using Adobe RGB as an example, and with local dimming off, it performs spectacularly and the contrast range is very acceptable. I find myself turning down the brightness a lot when working in this mode. The monitor's dedicated sRGB mode clamps the peak brightness to 100 nits and upon first use it will warn you about California energy standards and limiting brightness or some such, and then recommends you use standard mode. I'm sure this is to keep people from complaining about the target brightness for SDR. I primarily use the monitor in Adobe RGB. I have not yet had the chance to calibrate my own user profiles, but the factory report listed an Adobe RGB ΔE of 0.35, sRGB ΔE of 0.6, DCI-P3 ΔE of 0.9 and a Gama of 2.17.You can see in the images I shot of the 16 bit gradient from RTINGS that it reproduces perfectly and with no upsetting banding or issues. However when using the EIZO Monitor Test in HRD (All HDR color modes) you can see there is significant banding issues and areas where the gradient is darker before it becomes lighter again. This issue did not present itself in SDR WCG. I decided to take a screen shot of the test in Win 11 with color management disabled. Reading the values in Photoshop reflected the same inconsistency meaning that the irregularity either exists in the way Win 11 is displaying HDR or a fault in the way the EIZO test displays it. The monitor was behaving exactly as expected.There is some image retention as IPS is want to do and is exasperated when switching from high contrast imagery to uniform grey such as most dark mode UIs. It's not noticeable when photographic or video content is displayed. While the retention is very minimal it makes me worry as image retention became worse with my old monitor as it aged out. What was particularly odd was that running the UFO motion video test, there was a checkerboard pattern from the test left on the display that oscillated. Never seen anything like it. A power cycle cleared it.The grey uniformity is fine. Wouldn't call it stellar and it doesn't show up on camera, but there sometimes can be slight perceptible variance of the lighting zones on a dimly lit uniform dark grey with local dimming off. It's still better than a lot of other monitors. The monitor doesn't have the best viewing angles, not VA bad, but there's vignetting that is position dependent.The bummer, the real big bummer, and this seems to be the norm for a lot of monitors, is the inverse blooming when using local dimming and it's a sour experience in HDR. Under most content it's not noticeable, but as you can see from the picture, it's pretty intense, but the photo and dark mode greys makes it look worse. You wouldn't notice thins if you don't use dark mode or a grey UI. There have been moments where the inverse blooming creates a slightly dark halo around certain foreground shots against an muted backdrop. I don't want to sound like the local dimming is terrible, it's just better at certain tasks, and static areas is not one of them. I think it's something I can live with and it's something I expected and new about when purchasing it.Blooming under HRD however, I really don't see an issue. It's there, it's not as terrible as people make it seem, and it's worth it for what you are paying. There's a significant jump in price to double the dimming zones. Either way, this monitor delivers a HDR experience that is vastly better than my QLED Samsung TV with it's VA panel which cost twice as much. Is it bad HDR for someone color grading HDR Rec 2020 for a living, probably, but this is a sub $2K display that allows me to work with and enjoy HDR.One of the headaches I faced as a gamer and choosing a new display is that usually you can either have an amazing gaming monitor that sucks for design, or an amazing monitor for design that sucks for gaming, at this price point. I'm not a completive gamer, but I also don't want to game on a slug. The model that preceded this as tested by Hardware Unboxed measured an insane input lag of 60ms. This made me nervous, especially since the monitor it was replacing, while mediocre at motion, had an insanely low latency. I haven't done any kind of professional latency test, however i did some tests using a frame timer and a 240 fps camera. While not in a game or using a wireless controller, all my tests were two frames or less. This puts the latency around 34ms on the high side and 25ms on the low side. Significant, but no worse than a console and a TV. So, yes, gaming on this monitor is an enjoyable experience and things like Cyberpunk 2077 are very playable and in HDR, beautiful really. I'm happy with this. The motion of this monitor is also significantly better than the one it replaced. All around motion clarity is very good, much better than what I had before and the Motion Sync, or what I assume is black frame insertion does a great job of increasing motion clarity at the expense of brightness. In HDR with the more conservative motion sync on, you can expect something on par with HDR 600 in terms of brightness.A few minor caveats. There is one dead (stuck off) green sub pixel in the far lower left quadrant of the screen. I only noticed during a test. The warranty states not more than 5 stuck off sub pixels and zero stuck on pixels. There are no other pixels I've noticed being out. Sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. The monitor takes an absurd amount of time to wake up or switch between HDR and SDR. On average of 8-10 seconds. It's a slug.A note about the way the product is packed in the box. The box does not say -K on it. When I received mine, I lifted the top of the box off as you would and inside I found only the monitor and the stand. No colorimeter, no cables, nothing. Turns out that they were still stuck inside the top of the box I lifted off. I upsettingly called Amazon that I'd been shipped not only the wrong product, but that it that was a return and missing items. To Amazon's credit they were ready to ship out a replacement for me. While on hold I discovered my error and that everything was there and I profusely apologized to the lady that helped me.