New Toys Sept’14 Part 1 of 2 – BenQ BL2710PT 27” WQHD

After having my beast of a desktop replacement laptop (ASUS n73sv) for a few years now the screen has become a bit temperamental. This and the fact I am using Lenovo Yoga2 Pro ultra book more and more (due to portability/screen res) has resulted in a void in powerful home processing.

Therefore I felt to solve this problem I would get a beefy screen to allow me to work more comfortably at home and in theory write more of my thesis (instead of this blog… shh). I wanted something above the 1920x1080 resolution, since I know that two screens isn’t an option used in conjunction with the old ASUS. Two competitors came to the fore the BenQ BL2710PT and a Dell, oddly the Dell had very bad reversed when used over HDMI and you have to do a lot of hard work to get over the locked down 1080p. So I opted for the BenQ and am very happy with the results.

The BenQ BL2710PT 27”

No one would ever say this is a beautiful monitor, but they would say it is very functional. It does what it needs and has wonderful colour and good true-blacks. Although my graphics card wasn’t over the moon about running at 1440 after a little convincing was happy to run 1440 @ 55Hz (don’t ask why not 60, I couldn’t coax it into getting up to that). I read some reviews of the equivalent Dell that you can only get 30Hz over HDMI with some converters and that it is fine if you increase the mouse rate, that is complete rubbish it feels laggy at 30Hz for a production machine it is simply not good enough.

The one criticism I have is the inbuilt speakers, they are pretty terrible (not that I have had much good experience with in screen-speakers). You have to remember this is marketed as a CAD monitor so you wouldn’t expect this to be a high interest feature. The addition of 2 USB3 ports on this side of the screen is a nice touch very useful extending out your storage options.

Some kind of conclusion

It is hard to have a decisive exciting conclusion from a screen, it does what it is supposed to. Would I opt for two monitors over this definitely, if you don’t have that as an option or you want to watch movies in bed then this is a great screen for you to get that extra screen estate. The only real hurdle to this screen is price, at £400 it is steep especially when you think a 1080 screen will set you back £150, a couple of those comes in a lot cheaper for more screen real-estate.

I do know there are some entry level UltraHD( 3840x2160 ) screens often these are locked to 30Hz. Ignoring that issue, I simply didn’t need it my GPU was being pushed to max-resolution poor little GeForce 560m so I opted to save the money and probably get a better UHD screen later when I get something to power it.