ASUS PA249Q Pro IPS Monitor Review

Introduction

Monitors tend to be the red-headed stepchild amongst the hardware suite. We spend hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds to have the fastest, smoothest, most gorgeous media and gaming experience available. Then buy the cheapest 1080P monitor it’s possible to get to display it all.

This is compounded by the vast increase in the availability of digital media creation. We all own a digital camera of some type, even if it’s just the one on your phone, and with social media now a part of daily life it most of us share family gatherings, our ‘look at how rich I am’ purchases, selfies or even just pictures of our coffee. As well as this the explosion in affordable, or even free, creation tools such as GIMP and the monster popularity of websites such as Worth1000 or DeviantArt has meant that ever more of us are using our systems as a means of creation rather than just playing.

Quite why we feel that the thing we look at, the result of all our expensive tinkering and graphics card choices, the only output we have, should be the one area that we can cut corners on is unfathomable. Whether it’s just gaming, or content creation, you want the best possible image fidelity and colour reproduction. Having accurate colour reproduction is vital in design because you want to be certain that everyone who sees your work, and/or the print copy, perfectly matches your vision.

You could purchase a hugely expensive calibration kit and attempt to manually calibrate your monitor, but unless you’ve brought a decent model to begin with then it would only be an exercise in frustration. ASUS have neatly solved this problem with the PA249Q, a monitor that not only has an IPS panel but comes with a genuine factory calibration and proof of such.

Technical Specifications

The PA249Q has everything you could desire in a monitor when it comes to features. The 1920×1200 resolution allows you extra screen space when working on HD images. The pixel pitch is small which enhances the crispness of the resolution. Whilst we know that brightness and contrast are always inflated because big numbers attract people who don’t know how little stock to put in them, the incredible colour accuracy shows that the PA249Q retains definition rather than just blowing out highlights and losing all shadow detail.