If you deliver to the web — YouTube, a client’s site, social — the honest answer is that a 100% sRGB panel with a calibration report in the box is all the color you need, and the ASUS ProArt PA279CV is the cheapest one here that also publishes 10-bit display colors. If you deliver anything in P3 or HDR, you need a panel whose maker publishes a P3 coverage figure, and the BenQ PD2730S is the one we would put on the desk: 98% P3 on a 5K matte panel that also charges the laptop. If you grade HDR, the LG 32U990A-S is the only screen here with both a published P3 number and a DisplayHDR certification behind it.
Everything else on this page exists because editing has two separate hardware problems that get confused with each other. One is color: will what you see match what you deliver. The other is geometry: how much panel is left for bins, scopes and a timeline once the viewer has taken its pixels. A monitor can be excellent at one and useless at the other, and the specification sheet tells you which — if you read the four lines that matter and ignore the rest.
Criterion 1: the color space you deliver in, not the biggest number
Color gamut is not a quality score. It is a container, and the only question that matters is whether the panel covers the container your footage ends up in.
- Web and broadcast SDR land in Rec. 709, which for practical purposes shares its primaries with sRGB. A panel that covers 100% sRGB and Rec. 709 covers that work completely. Buying wider gamut for it buys nothing.
- Cinema and most HDR delivery land in DCI-P3or Display P3, a noticeably larger container — mostly in the reds and greens. A 100% sRGB panel physically cannot show you the parts of a P3 image that fall outside sRGB. It will show you something, and that something is wrong.
So the first filter is simple: find your delivery space, then look for a published coverage percentage for thatspace on the maker’s own specification page. Here is what the six panels below publish.
| Panel | Published coverage | Published bit depth | Right for |
|---|
| BenQ PD2730S (27″ 5K) | 98% P3, 100% sRGB | Not published as a color count | P3 and HDR delivery |
| ASUS ProArt PA279CV (27″ 4K) | 100% sRGB; no P3 figure published | 1.07 billion (10-bit) | Rec. 709 and web SDR |
| LG 32U990A-S (31.5″ 6K) | 98% DCI-P3, DisplayHDR 600 | Not published as a color count | HDR grading |
| BenQ PD2725U (27″ 4K) | 95% Display P3, 100% sRGB / Rec. 709, Delta E under 3 | Not published as a color count | Mixed SDR and P3 work |
| Dell UltraSharp U3425WE (34″ ultrawide) | No coverage figure we could verify at source | Not published as a color count | Timeline width, not the grade |
| ASUS ProArt PA248QV (24.1″ 16:10) | 100% sRGB | Not published as a color count | Scopes, bins and a second screen |
Two things to notice. First, the ASUS ProArt panels list a DCI-P3 preset in their feature list without listing a DCI-P3 coverage percentage— a mode that targets a space is not the same claim as covering it, and we do not treat it as one. Second, Dell publishes a great deal about the U3425WE’s ports and nothing we could verify about its gamut, which is exactly why it is ranked here as a timeline screen rather than a color screen.
Criterion 2: bit depth, because gradients are where cheap panels fail
The second published number is “display colors”, and it is the line most buyers skip. 16.7 million means 8 bits per channel. 1.07 billionmeans 10 bits, usually 8-bit plus dithering, and makers say so in those terms. The difference shows up in one place: a smooth gradient. A sky, a studio backdrop, a slow fade to black. On an 8-bit panel those become visible steps, and you cannot tell whether the banding is in your footage or in your screen — which makes the panel useless for judging the thing it is banding on.
This is why the PA279CV is the value pick here instead of its cheaper QHD sibling. ASUS publishes 1073.7 million display colors for the PA279CV and 16.7 million for the PA278CV, on otherwise similar ProArt specification sheets. Same brand, same calibration promise, one of them 8-bit. For code or spreadsheets that difference is invisible; for grading it is the whole point.
Criterion 3: evidence of calibration, not the word “calibrated”
Every monitor marketed at creators says it is calibrated. Three things make that claim checkable, and all three appear on specification pages.
- A printed calibration report in the box.ASUS lists a “Color pre-calibration report” in the bundled accessories for both ProArt panels we checked. That is a per-unit measurement, not a product-line promise.
- A third-party verification mark or a published Delta E. Both ProArt panels carry Calman Verifiedon ASUS’s own certificate list, and BenQ publishes a Delta E under 3figure for the PD2725U. A mark or a number is a claim someone can be held to; “factory calibrated” alone is not.
- Hardware calibration support— writing a correction into the monitor’s own lookup table rather than into the operating system’s profile. None of the panels here publishes it, and we are not going to imply otherwise.
None of that replaces a colorimeter. Panels drift, and a monitor you grade on wants re-measuring every few months. What a report and a verification mark buy you is a sane starting point and a reason to trust the preset labeled Rec. 709.
Criterion 4: the pixels left for a timeline after the viewer takes its share
Here is the arithmetic nobody does before buying. A 4K timeline previewed at 100% needs 3840 x 2160 physical pixels for the viewer alone. A 27-inch 4K panel has exactly 3840 x 2160 and therefore has nothing left for the interface — which is fine, because almost nobody previews at 1:1, but it explains why edit bays keep buying panels above their delivery resolution.
| Panel | Physical pixels | Left over around a 1:1 4K viewer | Approx. density |
|---|
| 27″ 4K | 3840 x 2160 | Nothing | ~163 ppi |
| 27″ 5K | 5120 x 2880 | 1280 wide x 720 tall | ~218 ppi |
| 31.5″ 6K | 6144 x 3456 | 2304 wide x 1296 tall | ~224 ppi |
| 34″ 21:9 WQHD | 3440 x 1440 | Nothing — too short for a 1:1 4K viewer | ~110 ppi |
| 24.1″ 16:10 | 1920 x 1200 | Nothing | ~94 ppi |
Densities are computed from the published resolution and the width multiplier for each aspect ratio (0.872 of the diagonal for 16:9, 0.848 for 16:10, 0.922 for 21:9), the same arithmetic the programming monitor rankings use. The practical reading: an ultrawide is a strong timeline screen and a poor viewer screen, because 21:9 is short. 1440 pixels of height has to hold the viewer, the scopes and the track stack, and it will not.
What this page ignores, and why
- Refresh rate.Your timeline plays at the footage’s frame rate. A 120Hz panel does not make a 24p clip smoother; it makes dragging windows smoother. Pleasant, irrelevant.
- Response time and adaptive sync. Gaming specifications. They do not affect a judgment about an image.
- “HDR supported”.That line means the panel accepts an HDR signal, which is not the same as being able to show it. Only a certification with a number behind it — DisplayHDR 600 on the LG here — tells you anything about the panel’s actual luminance behavior.
- OLED. Per-pixel black is genuinely better for judging shadow detail, and an edit interface is a static layout of panels and toolbars on screen for eight hours, which is the pattern OLED makers publish care guidance about. We raise the same caution on the ultrawide rankings and we are consistent about it here.
Two screens beats one big one, for this job specifically
Most desk work is better on one large panel. Editing is the exception, because the interface wants to be in fixed places and the image wants to be uninterrupted. The arrangement that works is a color-accurate main panel holding the viewer and the timeline, plus a cheaper, accurate-enough second screen holding scopes, bins, effect controls and the audio mixer. That is why the PA248QV is on this page at all: it is the panel that takes the clutter off the screen you judge on.
If you go that way, put both on arms. Two stock stands eat the desk depth you need to sit far enough back from a 27 or 32-inch panel, and matching the eye line of two different-sized screens by hand is miserable. Ours are ranked in dual monitor arms, and the step people skip afterwards is in how to align dual monitors.
The ProArt we checked and deliberately did not rank
The ASUS ProArt PA278CVis the obvious cheap entry point and it is a good monitor — it is the top pick on our programming monitor rankings for exactly the reasons it is wrong here. ASUS publishes 16.7 million display colors for it against the PA279CV’s 1073.7 million, and 2560 x 1440 against 3840 x 2160. For code that is irrelevant. For judging a gradient it is the one specification not to economize on, so the 4K sibling is the pick — and we would rather say why than quietly leave it out.
Scaling, and why 5K and 6K panels are not as big as they look
A 218 or 224 ppi panel is designed to be run at 2x, which means the operating system reports a logical desktop of roughly half the pixel count in each direction — about 2560 x 1440 on the 5K panel, about 3072 x 1728 on the 6K. Every pixel is still working; it is working on sharpness rather than on space. The 1:1 viewer arithmetic above is about physical pixels, which is the right frame when you are asking whether an image is being shown without resampling. The logical numbers are the right frame when you are asking how many windows fit. Both are true at once, and conflating them is how people end up disappointed by an expensive screen.
The order to buy in
- One accurate main panel in your delivery space. Not two mediocre ones. Everything else on the desk is cheaper to fix later.
- A colorimeter, before a second screen. Nothing on this page, at any price, stays accurate without measurement. A calibration report tells you the panel left the factory right; it says nothing about today.
- The second screen and the arms. Scopes and bins off the main panel, both screens on the same eye line.
- Then the desk-side plumbing. One Thunderbolt cable to a laptop is only tidy if the other end is managed; the Thunderbolt dock rankings and under-desk cable management cover what the one-cable desk actually needs.
What a monitor cannot fix
It cannot make an ungraded shot look graded, and it cannot tell you what a client will see. The honest ceiling on all of this is that your viewer’s screen is uncalibrated, probably glossy, and possibly a phone. Accuracy on your desk is not about matching their screen; it is about removing your screen as a variable, so the decisions you make are about the footage. That is what a published coverage figure, a published bit depth and a calibration report buy you, and it is the whole of this page.
