Microsoft Surface Studio vs Asus Zen AiO ZN241ICUT

The Surface Pen (included) is back with the Studio, but a new addition is the Surface Dial (sold separately for $99). This dial provides haptic feedback, and can rotate. It has a grippy rubber base, which means you can place it on the screen and it will stay there. Rotating it can do different things - rotate the image on the screen, change colors of the pen while drawing a continuous line, or rotate images in a 3D space (which Microsoft is pushing in their next update in early 2017).

The Surface Pen works similar to previous versions - it can measure pressure sensitivity, and there are buttons on the side that allow for selection or other functions.

The 28" display has an interesting aspect ratio of 3:2, and it has an extremely high resolution of 4500x3000 (slightly more than 4K). It also has different modes (built into the software) to display Adobe sRGB or Vivid Color Profiles. This allows content creators to both see the true colors, but also how they will likely be displayed on an average display. This display has a pixel density of 192ppi, which allows you to get very close to it without being able to see individual pixels.

The screen is also a touchscreen, with sensors for both the Surface Dial as well as the Surface Pen. In addition to all of this, they are marketing it as the thinnest display on any AIO (all in one) desktop which is technically true - it is the thinnest, however most of the internals are housed in the base.

With a 7th generation i5, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, the Zen AiO offers great performance for day-to-day tasks such as browsing the web, editing documents, programming, and even some light photo editing. It also manages to handle some low-resource games such as Civilization V quite decently.

At $970 it's also one of the best all-in-one PCs as far as the price/performance ratio goes.

The screen is very bright with lifelike and warm colours. Although images are not very sharp or as colour-accurate as some more expensive options.

Thanks to the included 128 GB storage the computer starts up almost instantly and programs load quickly if they are installed on that drive.

Directed toward the user, the speakers are able to produce loud audio without getting distorted even at high volumes.

The default wireless keyboard is very comfortable. The keys have decent travel distance and offer great feedback when typing.

There are in total of 6 USB ports available. Great if you have a lot of peripheral devices to connect to it. Two of them are the faster USB 3.1 while four are 3.0 USB ports.