ASUS PB279Q Review: Is this 4K at its best?

By Anirudh Regidi | Updated Nov 04 2019

DIGIT RATING

70 _/100

design
80
performance
77
value for money
65
features
58

PROS
100% sRGB support
Exceptional 4K performance

CONS
Disappointing white levels

Verdict

An exceptional 4K monitor that's ideal for design professionals and well-heeled gamers alike. Everything about this monitor just oozes quality and performance and we are yet to test a 4K monitor that's this good. The monitor is a bit shy on features and is expensive, but if you're looking for 4K, aim for this one.

BUY ASUS PB279Q

Price

62500

ASUS PB279Q detailed review

We’re slowly seeing more and more 4K monitors trickle into the market and we couldn’t be more excited. We’ve always maintained that 4K on a 27+” monitor is ideal for working with, though maybe not so much for gaming, and ASUS’s PB279Q fits the bill perfectly.

This was the first monitor in our many years of testing that actually managed to display a 100 percent sRGB profile (most good monitors manage 96 per cent). This is, of course, of little importance to the average user and you will most probably not even notice the difference in colour quality with your naked eye; which is why, sadly, we couldn’t rate this monitor as highly as we wanted to.

A contrast ratio of 580:1 @ 120cd/m2 is excellent and this goes up to 2530:1 @ 46cd/m2. Maximum measured brightness (100per cent) was also very high at 334cd/m2, though we would highly recommend that you tone down the brightness to a more comfortable 25 per cent. The monitor loses out badly when it comes to luminance uniformity and white levels, though it’s still on par with most decent monitors. We saw a variation of up to 15 per cent in brightness levels between the centre of the screen and the extremities, which is acceptable, but we were hoping for better from this monitor.

We played games on the monitor at 4K, 2K and at 1080p and we must say, they look stellar. Games like Counter-Strike: GO were a pleasure to play and even at 4K the refresh rate was good enough to let us play comfortably. The monitor was excellent even at 1080p, but no match for a proper 1080p panel. Movies were a pleasure to watch as well, but anything below 1080p looks quite awful. Our recommendation: if you’re getting this monitor for gaming at 4K, ensure that you have a GPU that’s at least as powerful as a GTX 980 or an R9 290X.

Specifications
Panel Size: 27-inch
Colour saturation: 100% sRGB
Resolution: 3840x2160 @ 60Hz (DP1.2) @ 30Hz (HDMI)
Brightness: 334cd/m2
Contrast Ratio (calibrated): 580:1
Response Time: 5ms; Speakers: 2Wx2