Asus PB287Q: A budgetfriendly Ultra HD display

       UNTIL RECENTLY, SHARP’S $3500 PN-K321 was about as affordable as 4K desktop monitors got. With the $649 PB287Q, Asus joins Dell and Samsung in making Ultra HD desktop monitors affordable for consumers. Are today’s applications, hardware, and operating systems ready to make the leap? Our tests of the PB287Q revealed mixed results.

The Asus PB287Q
4K display includes
two HDMI 1.4 ports
and one DisplayPort
1.2, but it lacks a
USB hub.

      The 28-inch PB287Q has an impressive list of features, including 3840-by-2160-pixel resolution, LED backlighting, two HDMI 1.4 ports, a single DisplayPort 1.2 connection, a bright 330 cd/m2 luminance rating, and a 1-millisecond gray-to-gray response time. It offers picture-in-picture as well as pictureby-picture support, MHL support, and decent built-in 2W speakers. The highly flexible stand has height adjustment, pivot, swivel, and tilt capabilities.

No USB hub

      On the downside, the PB287Q lacks a USB hub for connecting peripherals. Its on-screen menu system is clunky, as well: Six dots and a power icon near the lower-right corner are meant to guide you when you’re using the physical buttons on the back. I found myself hitting the wrong button more often than not. Frequently the menu timed out as I fiddled around trying to press the right combination of keys.
      You use those menus to access the brightness, color, and speaker-volume settings; as well as eight SplendidPlus display modes, including Reading, Theater, sRGB, Game, and Standard modes. The Standard mode proved to be the best option for our tests.
      Providing four times as many pixels as 1080p high-definition displays, 4K monitors require serious graphics horsepower to run at full resolution and standard refresh rates. The PB287Q can run at 60Hz when connected to a compatible graphics card via DisplayPort 1.2. Refresh rates are limited to 30Hz over HDMI 1.4. When it’s running at 30Hz, you can almost feel the cursor drag across the screen. Playing games at 60Hz over DisplayPort 1.2 seemed smooth enough, however, and I’ll attribute any lag I saw to the graphics card’s struggles to support the high resolution.

Early days for 4K

      Apple’s 4K support extends only to recent MacBook Pros and to the new Mac Pros. OS X 10.9.3 dramatically improves the look of Ultra HD monitors in both native and scaled resolution modes, but many applications are not optimized for Ultra HD—at full resolution, icons and menu text are tiny. You can increase text and icon size easily enough, but many times I found my aging eyes squinting at itty-bitty text.
      On PC graphics cards, 4K support is more common. Windows 8.1 does a good job of displaying its icons, menus, and other screen elements at reasonable sizes regardless of the resolution setting.
      Next to the Sharp and its IGZO screen, the PB287Q has a limited angle of view: Colors shift as you move left, right, up, or down from center. Text on the Asus had a grainy, slightly broken appearance, as if some pixels were missing; it looked better from a bit of a distance, but it was never as clean as the text on the Sharp.

The PB287Q can pivot into portrait mode.

      The 31.5-inch Sharp has a pixel density of 140 ppi; the Asus, 157 ppi. That increased pixel density makes icons and screen elements appear smaller, which is more of a problem at very high resolutions. In test photos, the colors on the Asus were a little muted compared to those on the Sharp, but again, the PB287Q costs one-fifth as much as the PN-K321.
      If you need an Ultra HD display to view large images or to work on 4K video, you’ll find the Asus PB287Q to be a serviceable choice. It works best with DisplayPort 1.2, so make sure that your existing hardware is compatible.