right now you're watching the very first Linus tech tips video in high dynamic
range or HDR or if that is you're
watching it in HDR if you're on an hdr10 compatible display and video platform
one reason it took us so long to do this was that we didn't have the budget for
an appropriate HDR mastering monitor that is until now
introducing the product that we are both reviewing today and creating today's
video on the ASUS pa-32 pa-32ucx
it's a 32-inch 4k mini led monitor with
over a thousand full array local dimming zones and support for HDR 10 hlg and
dolby vision all at a whopping 1
200 nits of brightness but at a definitely too expensive for
normal people yet somehow still cheaper than the apple pro display xdr price
of 4500 who exactly is this monitor for
the answer is fascinating
almost as fascinating as today's sponsor the rs15g features Intel's 10th gen
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features check it out today at the link in the video description
here's something fun let's start with who should not get this monitor if
you're a professional doing color critical work but you're not doing HDR
video or if you're like a tech trend setter showing off for your friends
then there's no reason to buy it save your money graphic artists buy a tv
influencer gamers on the other end of the spectrum if you're mastering a 200
million dollar hollywood feature film in HDR well it's probably not wise to bet
the farm on a consumer display you're better off with a sony bvmx 300
mastering monitor or one of the newfangled ones with dual layer lcds
this is for the in-betweeners independent filmmakers vfx artists or
even colorists or quality control personnel at large youtube channels
which okay don't get any ideas another potential customer is game developers
who want to see how their work renders in multiple HDR standards on a display
that can actually fit on their desk now many tvs would fulfill this function but
think about it a studio can't exactly put a 55-inch tv in everyone's cubicle
though that may actually change with lg's new 48-inch cx OLED which is on its
way right now subscribe for that review because i'm really excited about it for
now let's see what the pa32ucx can do
out of the box with no additional calibration our set performed well
there's just no other way to put it phenomenally i mean we're already used
to seeing 95 plus percent coverage of the dci p3 color gamut on OLED and other
displays that have quantum dot films but check out this coverage of bt 2020
that is huge in terms of accuracy ours did
oversaturate blue and under-saturated red a little bit but it still managed to
keep the delta e average under two so we're talking about deviations that
would be imperceptible to the human eye and if you want to go to the next level
you can immediately calibrate it yourself which will be especially easy
given that the north american models are going to have an x-ray i1 display pro
calibration device right in the box that's a pretty good value considering
that they're 285 dollars on xrite's store even if you don't calibrate it
right away you're going to need to do it at some point though you might not know
but monitors don't stay tuned forever and you should be recalibrating the
modes that are important to your workflow at least every couple of months
one thing that's cool about this monitor is that calibration profiles can be
saved on the scaler's integrated circuit rather than on the pc so you don't have
to fiddle around with any settings if you move this puppy in between devices
not that you would want to the pa-32ucx
is straight chunk at nearly 15 kilograms
including the stand which by the way i've got to say i'm a real fan of it's
not sold separately and has a wide stable base 28 degrees of tilt 120
degrees of swivel 13 centimeters of height adjust and full 90 degree pivot
both ways the reason this thing is so big and so
heavy is because of the backlight technology the pa 32ucx has full array
local dimming which means that the lights are right behind the panel as
opposed to at the edges and it uses mini
leds which at 200 microns wide are about
a fifth the size of traditional leds so this army of around 720
000 little lights is then divided up into
1152 dimming zones meaning that in theory this display should be able to
illuminate objects as small as five millimeters wide while leaving the rest
of the screen inky black with no halo effect now in practice the blooming is a
little bit bigger than that but it's still very good and this is really fun i
don't know if you've ever noticed this before but you'll even still get blooming on an OLED display where each
individual pixel is an independent light source turns out that's because of
something called veiling glare which can actually occur in your eye so to some
extent halos are inevitable kind of like callouts to lttstore.com
speaking of leds the brightness of this monitor is something to behold it holds
vasa's display HDR 1000 certification
which means that it's got to be able to hold a thousand nits across 10 of the
screen or a full screen flash
but it actually takes it to another level not only does it do a thousand it
does 1200 nits and it can sustain that brightness across the entire screen for
long periods not just flashes now that
will cause the display to heat up to the point where its cooling fans kick in but
the good news is that in our testing the monitor stayed pretty quiet even after
20 minutes of blasting pure white so the
thing is even though many movies are mastered using 4 000 nit displays
there's only about 20 of those in existence so more and more features are
being mastered at a thousand nits which means that the pa-32ucx can handle that
nicely plus a little bit of headroom on the flip side for content consumption
ASUS has given us three options for how to interpret HDR signals that contain
values beyond 1200 nits you can either hit the ceiling and
display everything at 1200 nits you can roll the top end off so that at least
you get some gradation at the highest brightness levels or you can normalize
the whole curve so if you own this monitor and you're wondering what in the
heck these options mean you're welcome one other feature that's
clutch when you need it is HDR preview mode now ASUS advertises this as a
function that triggers all content to be HDR simulated which sounds like a weirdo
sdr to HDR conversion that nobody should actually use but it turns out it's for
situations where your source is HDR but
the metadata isn't sending because like let's say your sdi to HDMI converter
isn't passing it through or something so this mode lets you manually configure
the monitor to have the same settings as the source and force it to display HDR
without a handshake pretty cool now to acknowledge the elephant in the room
apple's pro display xdr has some clear advantages it's higher resolution it
boasts a higher peak brightness its software control through macOS is way
more convenient than mashing buttons on your display and despite having half the
number of dimming zones we actually observed similar levels of bloom looking
at our units side by side but the thing is
the decision between them is kind of made for you because once you plug the
pro display xdr into a pc most of its benefits evaporate plus it's anywhere
between 500 to 2500 more depending on
the glass option you choose and whether or not you want to stand the good news
is that even if it's not quite at the level of the pro display xdr it's close
enough that pc shops who don't want to switch their whole ecosystem over to
apple and final cut have a legitimate choice
which still doesn't mean that i'm buying
one for you today's video is brought to you by
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check them out at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys
if you want the full scoop on the other pro display the pro display xdr go check
out our complete review of that it really is a fine piece of machinery as well