BenQ have released a large number of displays over the past 12 months, from creative-focused models, to coder’s displays (like the BenQ RD320U we had the pleasure of reviewing), to gaming monitors. The BenQ Mobiuz EX271UZ is primarily a gaming-focused 4K monitor, although with its claims of high color accuracy and 99% DCI-P3 coverage, plus a wide array of useful ports and features like an in-built KVM switch, it’s also aiming to be a strong dual-use display for creative productivity as well.

With its 240Hz maximum refresh rate combined with a 4th gen QD-OLED panel, it packs premium core specifications and has a high-end price tag to match, but is it worth the asking price? Let’s see how it fared in our testing.

Pricing & availability

At the time of writing, the BenQ Mobiuz EX271UZ goes for $999.99 / £849.99, although we can probably expect to see some price reductions in the coming months. Compared to the major competition, it’s priced reasonably when comparing the full-price MSRP, although the similarly specced Alienware AW2725Q can frequently be found on offer for under $750. The competing MSI MPG 272URX is at least $100 more expensive at full price, but can be found reduced to around $925 at the time of writing. 

Comparing the specs of these competing displays, the Alienware monitor has a more matte screen, only has 15W USB-C Power delivery, and has received complaints from some users of unreliability (so check your returns and warranty coverage if you opt for this one), but it does have eARC and can pivot between landscape/portrait, plus supports Dolby Vision for superior HDR. The MSI MPG display doesn’t have eARC support, but besides this either matches the specs of this BenQ Mobiuz or beats it – notably having superior brightness in our testing, a 90° landscape/portrait pivot, and DisplayPort 2.1.

Design & specifications

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The BenQ Mobiuz EX271UZ is a 26.5-inch comes with a fourth-generation QD-OLED panel with slightly higher PPI (Pixels Per Inch) than you’d typically get on older variants – specifically 166 PPI – which results in a nice a sharp picture on a screen of this size for both images and text. The panel coating is glossy, which further sharpens the images and makes those colors pop, although does mean increased screen glare/reflections, though there’s been an attempt to reduce these with the anti-reflective finish.

As far as we’re aware there’s only one color variant of this display, which is primarily white with black accents – aesthetics are obviously subjective but we’d probably describe it as looking ‘nice enough but not quite as premium as we would have liked’. The chassis is predominantly made of plastic, though it feels sturdy; we didn’t detect much in the way of screen wobble. 

For a monitor of this size, the adjustability of the stand is pretty disappointing – the pivot in particular is very limited, meaning you cannot put it into portrait mode. You get a 0-100mm height adjustment plus a -5° to +15 tilt, which are both fine, but a fairly limited ±15° swivel (we would have expected double this). The pivot is basically non-existent. If you want to replace the stand, you can also swap it out for a 100x100mm VESA mount, though this is not included in the box (as is fairly typical).

In terms of connectivity the Mobiuz EX271UZ impresses. For a monitor this size it has a great amount of USB-C (three) and USB-A (two) ports, including one USB-C port that has 90W Power Delivery and a DisplayPort Alt mode. You also get a dedicated DisplayPort 1.4 socket, a standard HDMI 2.1 socket (great for console users) and, more unusually, a second HDMI 2.1 socket with eARC (Enhanced Audio Return Channel) – which basically means you can run a cable from it to a soundbar and enjoy Dolby Atmos support – we’ve seen this feature on a couple of premium monitors like the Alienware AW2725Q but it’s still a fairly rare inclusion.

As mentioned the maximum refresh rate of the monitor is 240Hz, though this can be adjusted down to save on power consumption. The stated response time is 0.03ms which is what you’d expect from an OLED panel and is effectively instantaneous in terms of your eye’s ability to notice it. VRR support consists of native AMD FreeSync Premium Pro along with Adaptive Sync, allowing for G-Sync Support. Given the majority of users will be opting for an Nvidia GPU, native G-Sync would have been nice, however we had no problems during our testing.

There are no speakers in the EX271UZ, which is fine given the generally poor quality of monitor speakers (we typically think space and money is better suited for other features). Instead you get a 3.5mm headphone jack.

OSD, features, settings & warranty

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The On Screen Display (OSD) menu is pretty much your standard fare, and we found it fairly easy to navigate using the joystick control on the underside of the monitor. Alternatively you can use the included remote control which also comes with dedicated buttons that shortcut to the brightness levels, audio volume, input source, color presets, HDR mode, VRR mode, and the screen’s current refresh rate, amongst others.

There’s a good number of different color presets, 6 of which we tested as you can see in the section below. WIthin most of these you can then customize their individual brightness, contrast, gamma, color temp ettings etc. then reset them if you want to return to the default settings. There’s also fairly extensive Eye-Care and OLED Protection settings – the latter being especially important for gamers. Options for HDR are either HDR10 or VESA DisplayHDR 400 True Black.

In addition to the standard color presets within the OSD, there’s also an additional downloadable application called Color Shuttle, which actively tweaks your visual settings depending on the game you’re playing, to optimize them specifically for that game. Currently the number of titles in the Color Shuttle database is fairly limited, but as this grows this could be an interesting feature.

The monitor comes with BenQ’s standard 2 year limited warranty, which does not appear to cover OLED burn-in, so you’ll want to be extra careful with regards to that.

Screen testing & performance

We conducted our standard array of tests on the monitor using the DisplayCAL software.

Color gamut

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BenQ claims the Mobiuz EX271UZ has 100% sRGB and 99% DCI-P3 gamut coverage, however it fell slightly short of this in our testing. The first test we conducted was using the sRGB preset in the OSD, where we recorded only 97.3% sRGB and 72.9% DCI-P3; the Display P3 preset achieved 99.3% sRGB and 96.5% DCI-P3 gamut coverage; finally we used the Custom preset and manually set the RGB and brightness settings to the optimal values according to our colormiter (R:99, G:97, B:100, Brightness: 61) and attained 99.4% sRGB and 97.9% DCI-P3 gamut coverage, plus 91.4% Adobe RGB. 

This latter result is close enough to 100% sRGB gamut coverage that you could definitely do professional work in this space, and the DCI-P3 coverage is good enough for amateur work at least.

Color accuracy, contrast, gamma & brightness

In the table below we have listed each of the presets we tested from the menu of the monitor. As ever, we took the white point, black point, contrast ratio, average deltaE*00 (a measure of color accuracy), gamma, and brightness data for each preset. The top row of the table shows the ideal values for each of these data points, though it should be noted that the ‘ideal’ here is a technical standard, and might not reflect presets you’d prefer when viewing your content of choice.

As you’d expect from an OLED, black point and contrast ratio were virtually perfect across the board. The sRGB preset produced an exceptionally good average deltaE*00 score (the main measure of color accuracy), with a very good gamma score and a reasonable white point. The next best after this was the Display P3 preset.

The highest SDR brightness that we recorded was 190.23cd/m² which is unusually low, even for an OLED monitor, and substantially below the 250 nits claimed by BenQ. The lowest brightness measurement we recorded was 10.15cd/m² at 0%, and at 48% brightness we recorded 120cd/m² (the approximate value for natural light).

Panel uniformity

The last stage of our DisplayCAL testing focuses on panel uniformity, examining how evenly the display reproduces brightness and colour across the entire screen. The panel is split into a 5×5 grid for this test, with the central segment acting as the reference point used to evaluate all surrounding sections.

Areas recording a variance value under 1.00 are marked in green, indicating differences so minimal they’re effectively invisible to the naked eye – an ideal outcome for displays designed with professional colour accuracy in mind. Results falling between 1.00 and 3.00 are shown in yellow-orange, reflecting variance that most people still wouldn’t notice on the lower end of the scale, ranging up to fairly noticeable differences as you get close to 3.00. Measurements exceeding 3.00 are flagged in red, signalling a fairly pronounced deviation that may impact precision-focused creative work.

Looking at the results above, the monitor scored exceedingly well, with every cell being green other than two yellow ones on the leftmost side, which barely scored above 1.00 (with an average variance of 1.07 and 1.12).

In short, this monitor would be ideal for colour-accurate work, based on these results in isolation at least. That being said, it’s important to remember that uniformity varies from unit to unit due to the so-called ‘panel lottery’. While these results offer a reasonable indication of typical performance, your own sample may perform slightly better or slightly worse than the one tested here.

Viewing angles

As you’d expect from an OLED panel, the viewing angles were great. BenQ claims a viewing angle of 178° before you notice a significant drop in image quality and color vibrancy, and we’d say this is pretty accurate.

Gaming performance

We gave the Mobiuz EX271UZ across a range of different titles to see how it performed, including Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, Resident Evil: Village, and Counter-Strike 2. As a smaller sized screen you don’t get the same kind of immersion you would on a 32-inch or ultrawide monitor, however the image quality does draw you in very nicely with its deep contrast and rich, vibrant colors.

In fast-paced competitive titles like CS2 and Battlefield 6 it performed admirably. You’ll need a hefty PC to get around 240FPS at the native 4K resolution in most titles, but when you do, the 240Hz refresh rate of the display, combined with the excellent response time, means your gameplay feels fluid and seamless. Adaptive Sync performed well in our playtime, and although we would have liked to have seen integrated G-Sync rather than just G-Sync support, we didn’t experience any notable screen tearing on our NVIDIA-powered testing machine.

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General performance & productivity

OLED monitors are usually weaker than IPS models when it comes to text clarity; however, thanks to the high PPI of the 4K resolution on this modestly sized display, text looks pretty good on the EX271UZ. The anti-reflective coating on the glossy panel does mean it’s not one of the worst we’ve seen for screen glare, though you will still suffer from it a bit in the wrong environment, so bear this in mind.

The myriad ports, in particular the 90W USB-C socket, are a boon for productivity users. The KVM switch also makes it very useful if you’ve got multiple rigs that you want to switch between, whether you have a seperate streaming PC and editing PC or different workstations being used for different tasks – the myriad USB ports let you easily add all your peripherals to the monitor and then use the switch to quickly flit between machines without having to unplug and re-plug anything.

Although we would like to have seen better DCI-P3 gamut coverage for the price, you can still definitely use this screen for high-grade professional grade work in the sRGB space and also some DCI-P3 work if it doesn’t have to be quite as accurate.

Final Word: is the BenQ Mobiuz EX271UZ worth buying?

The BenQ Mobiuz EX271UZ is undoubtedly a good quality monitor for both gaming and creative/productivity work at 4K, the only problem is that, for the very high asking price, it falls slightly short of other competing models, in particular the MSI MPG 272URX, which does everything as well or better. The EX271UZ falls particularly short on the brightness results, as well as the ergonomics of the stand – were these two areas better then it would have scored more highly. As it is, if you can find this monitor at a significant discount then we would consider buying it, otherwise – opt for the MSI monitor instead for the more premium alternative, or the Alienware AW2725Q if you can pick one up at a significantly discounted price and are willing to risk some of the reported faults experienced by some units.

About the Author

Aaron Ritchie

Aaron's laptop knowledge makes him the go-to guy on PC Guide. But he still finds time for features, deals and much more.