FP91R

Spending the best part of £900 on a 19-inch 1,280x1,024 monitor might seem like insanity, but for colour professionals there’s a method to the madness. If you need spot-on colour, a conventional budget monitor will never provide it.

Calibration can only do so much, and it’s the quality of the panel that defines a monitor’s limits. So at the high end a combination of high-accuracy panel technology with regular calibration is used to make sure that the colours you see are the colours you get. The competition has been dominated by Eizo and NEC, and it’s a brave move by BenQ to try to set up a stall in this niche market.

It’s worth looking at the nearest competitor to make sense of BenQ’s strategy. The Eizo CG19 offers a subset of the FP91R’s features with a similar size and resolution, and costs more than £1,000. The BenQ’s advantage is that it’s bundled with its own colour calibration box. Unfortunately this only works on luminance calibration, not full colour calibration. So you’ll still need an extra calibrator to get the best results. Even so, there’s a saving of around £100 compared to the Eizo, for a very similar visual performance.

The BenQ has two DVI connectors – D-Sub is supposedly available, but it wasn’t included on our review model. There’s also a standard two-way USB 2.0 hub. As is standard on more high-end monitors, there’s a choice of colour spaces and colour temperatures, and it’s also possible to customise the colour distribution using six separate colour settings.

Special accessories include a folding light screen and the control device. This makes it relatively easy to navigate the set-up options, and it’s possible to run a luminance calibration cycle painlessly and quickly without using a computer. In fact, the FP91R will remind you when calibration is required, to make sure that drift is minimised. Generally, colour accuracy is very good. But brightness could be punchier – the quoted 250 cd/m2 (candelas per square meter) is on the low side for a high-end model. PC owners can use a supplied package called Visual Optimiser, which adds useful extra features to the calibration process but isn’t really essential.

The problem for BenQ is that this is a specialised product for a specialised market. Because of the price this isn’t a monitor that’s likely to be sold through the usual consumer channels. Meanwhile, BenQ’s dealer support network seems to be in the process of being set up. So irrespective of the quality of the monitor, it may not be easy to find somewhere that sells it. Having said that, it’s certainly cheaper than the two directly competitive models and offers very similar performance.

But even though the quality is good, the small resolution may make this monitor a tough sell. A 1,600x1,200 model with a correspondingly higher price tag might have been more attractive – especially given that there’s a direct link between monitor size and productivity.