This product is absolutely for the same kind of people who shop at Restoration Hardware, Gucci, Cartier, etc.
If it was for creative pros, it would have HDR. A $1600 monitor with no HDR, can you believe it? You can buy an entire laptop with an HDR mini-LED monitor from Apple for very nearly the same price. The base model iPhone mini can shoot in HDR but you can't play it back on the brand new Apple StUdIo MoNiToR from 2022.
> A $1600 monitor with no HDR, can you believe it?
Is there a good alternative for reasonably calibrated 27" monitor, with 5K resolution, integrated (96W) USB-C hub that have camera, good speakers and HDR? How much that monitor costs?
- Works with Mac or PC so you aren't screwed if you have a multi-platform environment, includes DisplayPort, HDMI, USB-A (4x), USB-C, headphone jack
For the same price as the Studio Display with stand upgrade ($1999) it seems like a better monitor. I guess it depends on whether you'd rather have 5K over 4K compared to HDR and mini-LED. For video production something like the ProArt seems like a no-brainer.
Speakers and a good camera are not selling points for displays. A solid webcam costs $50. Professionals aren't going to rely on monitor speakers, they're gonna spend <$100 and get something like the Sony MDR7506 studio monitors.
The Apple Studio Display is 100% made for your VP of Sales to put in his home office and look at.
As someone who got suckered into buying two of these pieces of junk let me warn you that while the panel is decent, everything around it royally sucks.
1. The stand is horrible and tends to be very wobbly. This has been the case with three ASUS monitors I have owned over the years (two of them being ProArt)
2. Lack of supports around the screen makes it extremely fragile. Example: I carefully placed the screen face down on the table for less than 10 seconds just to wipe of the dust in the back with a cloth and when I lifted it up, the screen was cracked :/
3. The boot up time is atrocious. I have timed it:
7 seconds just to get from a black screen to the slow ASUS animation logo to appear(because you must know who made this junk every time you turn this thing on.)
Then another 23 seconds back to black until it actually initializes and displays the desktop.
4. The worst possible thing of it all: The darn thing cannot properly resume from sleep half the time. On multiple different machines(Windows + Mac), I am required to switch to another input on the convoluted rear OSD menu buttons, wait another ~20 seconds, and then switch back (another ~20 seconds).
Then like an idiot I bought another one of these monitors after the first one broke because I got an unbelievable deal on this monitor on ebay(800$ price vs $5000 list price): ASUS Proart PA32UCG. This is supposedly a direct competitor to the apple XDR display and was given great reviews by this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfkUpcF5cZw
It has all the same problems as the other Proart Displays. How can they get away with charging thousands of dollars for this thing?!
>Speakers and a good camera are not selling points for displays. A solid webcam costs $50. Professionals aren't going to rely on monitor speakers, they're gonna spend <$100 and get something like the Sony MDR7506 studio monitors.
Man I really hate when people trot out nonsense like this and just dismiss things like good speakers or a built in webcam. First of all, the speakers on these ProArt displays are flat out useless. Unless you are playing OS sound effects, just forget about it. They are so underpowered and blur out the audio that you can't use it for anything else. Second of all, you now have even more junk to put on your table. With just a little bit of effort, they could have engineered a solution that is at least somewhat comparable to Apple but they couldn't even be bothered to do that even in 2022.
I will actively avoid ASUS after this experience. They still have a long way to go from their OEM manufacturing roots.
IMO, ASUS is taking the right path here. Everything besides the panel doesn't matter.
This particular model or lineup might not be the best, and maybe the QA sucks, but it's not like the 69% of people on Amazon giving it 4+ stars have gone crazy.
I see this another way: these ASUS displays are a firmware update away from being a better buy, and ASUS is just one competitor.
My prediction is that the Studio Display pretty quickly becomes a questionable purchase as more competitors enter the space and mini-LED displays become more prevalent. It's going to be a great webcam and speaker and a mediocre monitor at that price.
Also, if webcams and speakers are so important I wonder why the Pro Display XDR doesn't have either?
Honestly, that question lines up with my original claim: that the Studio Display is an aspirational purchase for non-creatives who have a lot of money and want a nice home office monitor for fiddling with spreadsheets and taking Zoom calls. The actual professionals (Pro Display XDR) don't have any need for some impressive for their size but not studio monitor built in monitor speakers and webcam.
Someone producing semi-professional video content is going to go with a display that supports HDR, especially considering that our consumer-level phones already record HDR footage.
You are making a lot of stretches to justify your point of view.
>This particular model or lineup might not be the best, and maybe the QA sucks, but it's not like the 69% of people on Amazon giving it 4+ stars have gone crazy.
Just glancing on Amazon, if you filter by 1 star reviews you get a listing of all the problems I mentioned. Your argument assumes that all the people praising it did not just base their review on initial impressions. You only notice most of my problems after living with the monitor for some time. Since all of my issues are cropping up in the 1 star reviews, I suspect that at least some of the positive reviews are people who were wowed by the initial panel quality.
>I see this another way: these ASUS displays are a firmware update away from being a better buy, and ASUS is just one competitor.
A firmware update that will never happen for the existing models. I checked my monitor in the hopes of fixing this dumb issue with the input detection and one of them actually has updates...just to add promised features after the first few models shipped from the factory without it. The other two? Nothing. in other words, once they fulfilled what the specs say, you are on your own.
I also fail to see how the poor stand/speakers can be firmware updated. That is something a daily user will have to live with.
It would be nice if there were multiple competitors but the real reason I purchased ASUS was due to a lack of competitors. I typically purchase Dell.
>My prediction is that the Studio Display pretty quickly becomes a questionable purchase as more competitors enter the space and mini-LED displays become more prevalent. It's going to be a great webcam and speaker and a mediocre monitor at that price.
This dumb argument is always made by Apple detractors/Android/PC fanboys. They only look at specs and fail to consider the product as a whole. I learned this lesson the hard way after 4 years of terrible Nexus phones.
If you think about it, you are getting exactly what you are paying for: Good panel in exchange for poor enclosure, poor firmware, poor stand, poor speakers. This does not seem like a deal unless you value all of those things at 0 which you are clearly doing. I concede that some low cost studios may adopt this for their workflow although I don't know if these panels are truly Dolby Vision certified given their lighting zones algorithms are pretty lousy in my experience. If you want to ensure you are getting quality, especially as an Apple user, the other panels are a no brainer. They have a reputation you can trust, ASUS does not.
>Also, if webcams and speakers are so important I wonder why the Pro Display XDR doesn't have either?
I'm not sure. The XDR is just a little over 2 years old so it is definitely plausible that it was intended as a 1st gen design to replace the LG display that everyone was complaining about(there were massive failure rates of that display so Apple needed something new for their new Desktop machine which was unveiled with the monitor).
I am assuming the studio display will support EDR with its 600 nits of peak brightness, so while it may not be hdr, it is not quite sdr either.
For those who don’t know, EDR works like this: when the built-in display of a supported mac is not at full brightness when playing HDR content it will ramp up the brightness to max to make use of the full range of the display for the HDR content while also dimming all non-HDR content to keep it at the same apparent brightness. The effect can be quite dramatic if you’re using the display at a low brightness setting, even on a 500 nit 5K iMac. The hdr content looks much brighter than a white finder window.
If it was for creative pros, it would have HDR. A $1600 monitor with no HDR, can you believe it? You can buy an entire laptop with an HDR mini-LED monitor from Apple for very nearly the same price. The base model iPhone mini can shoot in HDR but you can't play it back on the brand new Apple StUdIo MoNiToR from 2022.