Dell E2318Hx vs BenQ SW2700PT

The Dell E2318Hx is one of the cheapest 23-inch IPS monitors on the market. You’ll be hard-pressed to find it a matching competitor in its price range since the big manufacturers like HP, Dell, Samsung, LG, Phillips, Asus, Acer, and AOC don't offer such large panels in the sub $120 range.

Running this monitor 24/7 will cost you less than $1.2 per month in electricity bills because the Dell E2318Hx consumes only around 16 W of electricity, which makes it one of the most energy-efficient monitors in this price range.

This monitor doesn't feel disconnected and reacts to your actions quite rapidly as there is almost no lag between your actions and the actual stuff happening on the screen.

The motion looks good and blur-free because of the monitor's full pixel response time of 5 ms, which allows each pixel of the panel to change their colors within only five milliseconds. Therefore, only very tiny trails may follow fast-moving objects.

The monitor's picture quality is a tiny bit below the average because of its limited color gamut. However, the panel's peak brightness and native contrast ratio are on par with the rest of its competitors in this price range.

The Dell E2318Hx displays adequately-looking pictures with average blacks and vivid, yet a bit inaccurate colors. The dark scenes look mediocre because the monitor's native contrast ratio of 1000:1 is a little bit too low and can't push blacks to really intense levels. Colors look shiny since the monitor's backlight can get up to 250 nits bright.

However, you might spot some color inaccuracies because of the monitor's incomplete coverage of the sRGB color space, which results in color shifting.

The Dell E2318Hx is among the most versatile budget monitors because it offers fair responsiveness, low energy consumption, and adequate picture quality without breaking the bank.

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.