ASUS ProArt PA32UCX-P
The ASUS ProArt PA32UCX is the flagship monitor of the ProArt line. Everything ASUS knows about making monitors has gone into this display. It’s a 32 inch UHD HDR display that is designed specifically for professional color accurate applications. It’s got the connections, it’s got the calibration, it’s got the cables, it’s even got a colorimiter. Let’s take a look.
Technical Specs and Build
The ASUS ProArt PA32UCX is a substantial monitor, It’s 32 inch screen size coupled with its 93mm thickness results in a total weight of 14Kg. You’re going to need to make room on your desk for it. The monitor is supported by a solid stand (included) that allows movement up and down, 23 degrees of tilt, full left to right swivel and 90 degree rotation into portrait mode (which you will use often, just to plug in your connectors). The monitor also comes with a hood to shield the display from off-axis light sources. It also comes with a set of small stereo speakers internal to the unit, which always tends to be handy in many situations, even if they’re not up to the task of professional quality audio. The bezels are very thin, and the front face is essentially all screen.
The monitor has an impressive array of inputs consisting of two Thunderbolt 3 ports (that carry 65 watts of power for charging), a DisplayPort 1.2, three HDMI (v2.0) ports, a USB 3 hub, and even a headphone jack thrown in for good measure. The only serious connection that is missing is SDI, which I feel is fair to mention due to ASUS positioning this display as a professional grading monitor. Unfortunately all these connections are placed in the worst place possible, at the bottom of the monitor, facing down, in a recessed panel. This makes it pretty much impossible to plug things in by feel, requiring that you lift and tilt the monitor into portrait mode in order to connect anything. I know that the purpose of this is arranging is slightly more elegant cable management, but I firmly believe that all connections belong on the back of the monitor facing outward, cable management be damned, and I am willing to die on this hill. Thankfully the box contains all the appropriate cables you will need to connect to your computer. The cables include a Display Port, HDMI, USBC, Thunderbolt 3, and USBC to USBA adapter. This is more important than ever these days, with so many different protocols using the same USB type C connector.
Apparently there is a fan inside the unit, but I never noticed any noise even after prolonged HDR sessions.
The Display
The screen itself is a 32 inch Mini LED backlit, IPS panel, with a UHD resolution of 3840×2160, at 10 bit color depth and HDR capable with a maximum brightness of 1,200 nits. The screen surface has a matte finish to reduce glare and reflections.
The Mini LED backlight is divided into 1152 zones, that can be independently illuminated. This allows much higher brightness (1,200 nits) and contrast (1 million to 1) to parts of the image, without the risk of burn-in like OLED panels. The downside to Mini LED technology is that these zones can sometimes be visible in extreme high-contrast images resulting in a halo effect around bright objects, and they do not have the same deep perfect blacks as OLED screens. Things like star fields, scrolling credits, and neon-lit night scenes do show this behavior, especially in HDR. To help mitigate this there are dimming controls in the menu that can adjust the speed at which the dimming occurs, but it can not remove the dimming alltogether, as it’s inherent to the design of the Mini LED technology. Viewing normally lit interior and exterior video, the zone dimming is so subtle as to be unnoticeable, even in HDR. Additionally ASUS has added Off-Axis contrast optimization in the form of an optical material in the screen to reduce both the halo effect, and increase the contrast when viewing from severe angles. While this does help mitigate some of the issues, they are still noticeable.
Menus
The menu system is pretty confusing to use. There are no physical controls on the front of the monitor for aesthetic reasons, and so a joystick and six buttons are place in on the back side of the monitor in the lower right (if you’re facing the front of monitor). This means that in order to turn on the power and adjust the menus you must have enough clearance on the right side of the monitor for you to slide your hand through. The great thing about having such thin bezels on monitors is that you can place them close together, but nothing now fits on the right side of this monitor. Also annoying is that the way you adjust the menu buttons requires you to physically grip the side of the monitor which means the meaty part of your hand and thumb is resting on the front of the actual display, smudging it up. Adjusting the menu is desinged to be managed using a combination of the joystick and the buttons on the back as shortcuts. Every other button has a protruding dot on it, that is supposed to provide some tactile feedback as to which button your finger is on, but in practice I could never figure it out. The very bottom button is the power button, and I often turned the unit off accidentally trying to adjust the menus with the other buttons. Luckily you can do everything menu-wise with the joystick at the top so that’s what I ended up using exclusively.
Calibrating the ASUS PA32UCX-P
Proper calibration is critical to any color grading display, and here is where ASUS has gone the extra mile in its Pro Art Lineup. The -P variant of this monitor includes an ASUS branded version of the Xrite i1DisplayPro colorimiter in the box that works directly with the monitors internal calibration software, and other 3rd party professional calibration software as well. It’s a great feature to have a complete calibration system in the box, without having to buy additional hardware.
Out of the box the monitor has been calibrated at the factory for the following presets: sRGB, AdobeRGB and DCI-P3.The box contains the calibration reports for the monitor all with delta E’s well less than 2. The monitor is also preset with the ProArt Standard, Rec2020, DICOM (medical imaging), Rec709, HDR_PQ DCI, HDR_PQ Rec2020, HDR_HLGH, and DR_DolbyVision settings.
The normal OS level monitor calibration in Windows and MacOS is essentially useless for critical grading. A simple icc profile is nowhere near the quality of a 3D LUT, and that’s before it’s clouded with OS “features” like True Tone and window transparency. ASUS wisely has decided to save its calibration data directly into the monitor itself, bypassing all the OS level shenanigans. The PA32UCX uses its own internal pattern generator in conjunction with a simplified calibration software designed for that specific display. This is the perfect solution for monitor calibration, as professional calibration software is very expensive and can be difficult to parse the arcane technical details of many different display technologies. The simplified software approach allows you to focus on “I can calibrate this exact monitor that I own” rather than “I need to try to create my monitor profile out of a subset of all possible monitors and display technologies.” However if you want to have maximum technical control of your calibration, this monitor does support the Calman calibration software.
To calibrate, the monitor itself must additionally be plugged into the computer via Thunderbolt or USB, and the colorimiter should be connected to the USB ports on the monitor. Once all the hardware connections are in place the actual calibration is straightforward. Launch the calibration software, and follow the step by step instructions for the gamut/gamma/white point you want to hit. The whole process takes about 15 minutes (not including the 30 minute recommended display warm up time) including uniformity calibration. These custom profiles are saved in the user modes, and a printout of all the calibration data can also be saved.
The ASUS PA32UCX-P as a Computer Monitor
The screen’s size of 32 inches is almost enough, at UHD (3840×2160) to view the interface at its native resolution (assuming sitting at normal desktop monitor distances of around a meter). If your eyes are good enough this gives you an enormous amount of screen real estate to play with, at the cost of some legibility. For most, a high DPI magnification factor of 1.25 or 1.5 will be the best trade off between resolution and detail.
Having a monitor of this size right in front of you does have its drawbacks. Firstly the fall off of brightness and color towards the edges is very noticeable at this distance. Despite the addition of the off-axis contrast optimization optical layer, it’s not enough to compensate for the physics involved in being so close to such a large screen. By physically moving backward two to three meters from the monitor the fall off is eliminated, but not many people use their main computer monitor that far away.
Another drawback to using the ASUS PA32UCX-P as your main computer monitor is using the HDR feature. Having an HDR display right in front of your face can be far too bright to be comfortable. There was a point when I was mistakenly fumbling my way through the menu settings when I got a blast of the white background of a word processor at 1200 nits, which was blindingly offensive. Due to the fact that most computer GUIs contain high contrast blocks of solid colors (such as window backgrounds, menu drop downs etc.) this tended to exacerbate the halo effects exhibited by this monitor making just routine computer use distracting and annoying. For example just moving the mouse over a flat grey interface showed pronounced haloing in HDR.
To be fair to ASUS this is a problem with all HDR monitors from any manufacturer. HDR tone and gamut mapping are in their infancy in both Windows and Mac worlds, leading to annoying issues preventing the use of HDR for general computing. For example, the default mouse in Windows is a white arrow. There is no possible reason why this white arrow needs to be projected at 100% of monitor brightness, the GUI should tone map it down to 100nits automatically, the same when you open a blank white document. Also the benefit of having such a wide color gamut monitor is wasted if the OS doesn’t do any gamut mapping and makes what looks like a subtle orange icon in sRGB into psychedelic fluorescent super-orange in Rec2020. No OS looks good skinned in “electric neon monstrosity”, and hopefully both Mac and Windows will continue to improve in this area, as HDR computer monitors become more mainstream. For now I would definitely recommend using this monitor in SDR sRGB mode for general computer use, where all of these issues go away.
The ASUS PA32UCX-P as a Grading Monitor
Color accuracy is the raison d’etre for the PA32UCX, and ASUS hits it out of the park for the monitor’s primary use case of a color accurate calibratable monitor for creative applications. It’s a true 10 bit panel that gives 100% gamut for Rec.709/sRGB, 99% DCI-P3, 99.5% Adobe RGB, and a frankly remarkable 89% Rec.2020. Since Rec.2020 is more of an aspirational gamut at this point, with no current display technology able to hit 100% Rec.2020, the fact that ASUS was able to hit the high 89% mark ensures you’re probably going to have some of the greenest greens possible on a screen. However most professional HDR content for streaming services and Blu-ray are mastering in the more achievable DCI-P3 gamut.
At a maximum brightness of 1200 nits (typical 600 nits) this is a minimum acceptable level for grading HDR material. The ASUS PA32UCX supports decoding HDR 10, HLG, and DolbyVision signals. If you’re grading HDR material you will want to be sure that the PQ Clip option is selected in the HDR_PQ menu to ensure the monitor is not adding any additional roll-off in the highlights.
At normal grading monitor distances, the image fall-off at the edges becomes a non-issue, and grading HDR scenes that are normally lit interiors and exteriors was flawless, with brillant color and that HDR pop we’re all trying to achieve. It’s also nice to not have to worry about babying the display against burn-in like you would need to do for an OLED panel. Haloing did rear its ugly head in high contrast scenes like neon-lit nights, and star field space scenes. Another unexpected annoyance was that my secondary color correction GUI overlay (the white expandable circles and squares we use for secondaries) ended up haloing over dark scenes, making it difficult to tell if it was the local dimming or my lift controls that were changing the secondary luminience. This is most likely an issue because of the combination of poor tone mapping in the software UI with the inherent dimming tradeoff with mini LED displays.
In SDR this monitor can easily handle all varieties of footage, including high contrast scenes without any haloing issues. If you’re primarily grading HD and SDR 4k material the ASUS PA32UCX will serve you well, with exceptional performance and color accuracy.
Conclusion
The ASUS PA32UCX-P is a monitor that excels in almost every measure for display quality. The built in calibration software and included colorimiter is a huge benefit to ensuring color accuracy, and the extremely wide gamut displays more colors than any other monitor in this class. The only downside being an annoying haloing in certain high contrast scenes inherent to the Mini LED technology. It’s a much more robust panel than OLED with similar picture quality, but there are other technologies like microLED that are coming in the near future that may be able to combine the best of both technologies and eliminate their weaknesses. However if you need a UHD SDR color accurate monitor right now the PA32UCX-P is an unqualified buy. If you’re looking at this instead of a proper five figure HDR reference monitor, it’s likely to come up short. But if you’re just dipping your toes into HDR grading, and want to explore a new world of dynamic range, this monitor will easily be enough. All things considered, I’m delighted by ASUS’s presence in the color accurate professional monitor market. They are rapidly improving and innovating, and their monitors now command serious consideration.
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