ASUS ROG Strix XG27VQ vs BenQ SW2700PT

The picture quality of the ASUS XG27VQ is one of the best among all gaming monitors in this price range. This is due to its VA panel that offers high native contrast ratio, excellent peak brightness, great gamma, and fair color accuracy.

The XG27VQ does an excellent job of reproducing deep dark scenes, bright and vivid colors, and some eye-catching intermediate tones. The monitor can reproduce beautiful dark scenes thanks to its native contrast ratio of 3000:1 which allows it to display intense blacks. Colors look bright and vibrant thanks to the monitor's high peak brightness of 300 nits. Mid-tones look life-like because of the panel's nearly ideal average gamma of 2.25.

Additionally, the monitor's color inaccuracies are almost invisible to the human eye as its average color error dE is only 2.6.

FreeSync eliminates screen tearing and stutter, and reduces display lag because it allows the monitor to synchronize its refresh rate to the framerate of your Radeon GPU.

The ASUS XG27VQ supports the FreeSync in the 48-144 FPS range.

This monitor has multiple tools that enable it to display clear and blur-less motion even in the fastest FPS games, allowing this VA panel to compete against faster TN gaming monitors in this price range.

First, the artificial motion blur effect is virtually eliminated by the aid of ASUS's Extreme Low Motion Blur feature, which makes this LCD monitor behave more like CRT monitors.

Second, the monitor doesn't suffer from heavy ghosting as each pixel of the ASUS XG27VQ can change its color in 4ms.

Finally, the motion appears smooth and fluid because of the monitor's native refresh rate of 144 Hz, which enables it to display up to 144 frames each second.

The overall build quality of the ASUS XG27VQ suggests that this is a premium-class product. Each part feels rigid, as if the entire monitor was carved from a single piece of plastic.

You can adjust all the monitor's settings using your keyboard and a mouse thanks to the ASUS's desktop application.

The ASUS XG27VQ makes your overall gaming experience more immersive as its 1800R curved panel gives you the sensation of the screen surrounding you.

Additionally, the panel's curvature minimizes viewing angles on the sides of the monitor which noticeably improves the overall visual consistency of the panel.

The ASUS XG27VQ has a crosshair feature which allows you to add a crosshair to any game. It could improve your performance in games like CS: GO and Rust, where you can no-scope your opponents.

The ASUS XG27VQ offers remarkable gaming performance as it combines superb overall picture quality with excellent motion handling capabilities, well-handled input lag, and high native refresh rate.

Even though no one has tested the monitor's input lag yet, it seems to be within the four-millisecond range according to the general user reviews and the input lag tests of other ASUS ROG monitors from 2016-2017. Such input lag makes the ASUS XG27VQ one of the most responsive monitors in its price range.

The input lag of a monitor corresponds to the time delay between a GPU producing a frame and the monitor processing it. The lower the input lag, the more responsive and connected your gaming experience will be.

Full Adobe RGB coverage, a dedicated black and white mode, exceptional color accuracy, excellent connectivity, hardware calibration capabilities, great adjustability, and superb picture quality are only some of the features that make the BenQ SW2700PT an ultimate tool for photo editing in this price range.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find the BenQ SW2700PT a matching competitor in its price range because some of it's features unusual for a monitor that costs less than $1000. For example, 99% Adobe RGB coverage, hardware calibration capabilities, the 1 > dE, factory calibration, and the shading hood, aren't the things you'd expect from a monitor in this price range.

It’s dead simple to get the perfect viewing angles with this monitor, as the BenQ SW2700PT supports all the key ergonomic adjustments, including height, swivel, tilt, and pivot regulations.

Hardware calibration is an essential feature of a professional-grade monitor because it allows you to manipulate the monitor’s hardware, instead of simply tweaking the input of your graphics card - something the software calibration does.

You can use the monitor’s integrated USB hub to charge and interconnect peripheral USB devices and access SD cards. It consists of two downstream USB 3.0 ports, an SD card reader, and a single upstream USB 3.0 port that connects the hub to the computer.

The hub is located on the side of the monitor, which is an excellent and easy-to-reach position.

The BenQ SW2700PT does its best not to exhaust your eyes as not only its backlight is flicker-free, it also has an option to filter out the harmful high-intensity blue light.

The BenQ SW2700PT is an excellent tool for professional photographers and photo-editors because it can display the full range of sRGB and Adobe RGB colors within the exceptional accuracy.

With this monitor, you can edit and post-process any photo that is converted to either sRGB or Adobe RGB - the two color spaces that are most widely used in the professional photography.

Additionally, the BenQ SW2700PT lets you see precisely how each photo of yours will look like after it's printed because the Adobe RGB does cover the CMYK, which is the color space that is used by the overwhelming majority of printing houses.

It’s likely that you will not need to buy any extra cables as the BenQ SW2700PT comes with all the key cables, including an IEC power cord, DisplayPort, DVI, and USB 3.0.

This monitor is an excellent tool for those who like their photos in black and white because the BenQ SW2700PT has a dedicated black and white mode.

Each BenQ SW2700PT comes with an official, factory-issued calibration certificate.

The monitor’s shading hood is an excellent solution for minimizing or even eliminating glare and reflections caused by doors, mirrors, and windows, near the monitor.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that even without the hood, the BenQ SW2700PT does an excellent job of absorbing and diffusing reflections and glare because of its high peak brightness and matte screen finish.

Regarding its picture quality, the BenQ SW2700PT barely has any competitor in its price range as the monitor features the ultimate combination of native contrast ratio, peak brightness, gamma response, color accuracy, and pixel density.

It displays a beautiful, life-like image that has deep and rich blacks, vivid and realistic colors, natural intermediate tones and shades, and exceptional sharpness. The BenQ SW2700PT reproduces highly intense dark scenes even though its native contrast ratio is measured at the humble 1121:1. The key element here, however, is the monitor’s ability to reproduce extremely dark blacks that are only 0.01 nits bright - so dim, in fact, that only a professional grade luminance meter can measure it. Colors pop and look vibrant thanks to the monitor’s high peak brightness, which measures around 350 nits. Its color accuracy is indisputable as the SW2700PT’s average color error dE is measured at 0.61 - so small, that the human eye can’t perceive it. The mid-tones and shades are represented flawlessly, as the monitor’s gamma is only 0.09% away from its ideal value.

Additionally, the picture has that extra bit of sharpness and saturation because of the monitor’s high, 2560x1440 pixel resolution.

You can navigate through the monitor’s OSD menu and quickly swap between its color profiles using the BenQ’s remote control called ‘the puck’. It consists of five large navigation buttons and four programmable buttons that can be used to hot-swap three predefined color profiles.