BenQ RD320U review: a fantastic 4K coding monitor
Table of Contents
The BenQ RD320U is one of a number of task-focused productivity monitors that the company has released over the past couple of years, including the SW242Q photo editing display and the PD3226G for color-accurate video-editing/animation/gaming. This particular display is aimed towards coders and web designers, and also comes in a variant with an ergonomic arm – the RD320UA – though today we’ll be looking at the standard model with a regular adjustable stand.
A good coding monitor could also just be a good monitor for general productivity or creative purposes, but the key features required are: high clarity of text and characters on screen, extensive eye-care features to reduce strain over long working sessions, strong connectivity options via the I/O, and (to a lesser extent) good ergonomic adjustment. Often a 3:2 aspect ratio is also used to give greater vertical space when viewing reems of code or looking at web pages: BenQ produced the BenQ RD280U with this in mind, but the particular 32-inch model we’re reviewing today has the more conventional 16:9 aspect ratio, along with improved color gamut coverage and contrast – giving it extra utility as a display you can use for image-focused workflows, and meaning you can comfortably view two browser windows side-by-side.
We put the RD320U through our usual array of technical benchmarking and real-world testing – read below to see how it measured up.
- Panel type: IPS
- Resolution: 3840×2160
- Refresh rate: 60Hz
- Response time: 5ms
- Panel size: 31.5”
- I/O ports: 2x HDMI 2.0, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x USB-C/DP Alt Mode (90W PD), 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps, 7.5W PD), 1x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps, 4.5W PD), 1x USB-B 3.2 Gen 1 (upstream), 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, 3.5mm headphone jack
The BenQ RD320U is a great 32-inch, 4K monitor for coding, general productivity, and color-accurate work in the sRGB space. It’s not cheap, and for the price a refresh rate above 60Hz would have been nice, but it accomplishes its intended purpose very nicely, with great reflection handling and myriad features and optional settings that are actually very useful.
- Good reflection handling
- Useful features, visual presets, and eye care
- Good brightness, contrast ratio, and black point
- Fantastic color accuracy within sRGB space (with some user adjustments)
- Excellent connectivity & KVM switch
- Good adjustability (including portrait mode)
- Expensive
- Only 60Hz refresh rate
- Some screen wobble
- Aesthetically uninspiring from the front
Pricing & availability
The MSRP of the BenQ RD320U when it was first released at the end of 2024 was $699.99 / £599.99, which is quite a bit of money indeed, although not a huge amount more when you compare against the other market leaders in programming-focused displays. The Dell U2725QE for instance, retails for around £538 on Amazon UK, but is only 27-inches in size with inferior contrast ratio and reflection handling – it does however have a superior 120Hz refresh rate.
Since its release though, we’ve actually seen the monitor listed for higher than this in the US, now going for $779.99 on both Amazon US and the BenQ store, although UK pricing remains static.
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Design & specifications
The BenQ RD320U packs an IPS panel (from a source the company has not revealed, except to say it’s not LG) with higher-than-normal contrast. The screen is coated in a special ‘nano matte’ coating that is supposed to enhance its anti-reflection properties beyond what you see with a typical matte finish.
The 4K resolution, when stretched over the 31.5 inch screen, gives a Pixel Per Inch (PPI) of 140, which is pretty sharp, though not up there with what you’d get on a smaller size 4K display, or on the 28.2 inch BenQ RD280U for instance, which manages 164 PPI. Something to bear in mind given this is one governing factor that determines text clarity.
This is not a gaming monitor, so it has a fairly slow response time of 5ms grey-to-grey, which is to be expected, and there is no VRR to speak of. The maximum 60Hz refresh rate is also ‘fine’ for a programming monitor, though given the price tag, we would have liked to have seen something higher than this for casual gaming on the side or for viewing higher FPS footage for video editors or sports fans.
The adjustability of the stand is solid, with a height adjustment of 0-110mm, and (crucially for a coding monitor) the full ±90° pivot either way, allowing you to switch the monitor between portrait and landscape. Tilt ranges from -5° to +20, and it has a ±15° swivel. If you want to replace the stand, you can also swap it out for a 100x100mm VESA mount (this is not included when you buy the monitor though).
Aesthetically, it’s pretty basic, which is what you’d expect from a monitor that’s geared towards coding, however for the amount of money this display costs, we would have liked to have seen something a bit more premium-looking and a bit less grey. The highlight is the MoonHalo LED ring on the rear of the screen, which is designed to be functional and not just an aesthetic detail – providing soft ambient light for nighttime coding.
Build quality, for the most part, is pretty solid. There are no visible gaps where the bezel meets the monitor (usually you find one on the bottom bezel but it’s a tight fit here). The plastic build feels pretty good overall, though there is some flex towards the I/O ports.
The only real notable point is that there’s more screen wobble than we would have expected – not a huge amount but the chunky display section does have a tendency to move around quite a bit if knocked.
Connectivity options are great, which is what you’d want on a coder’s display, with three USB-C ports with power delivery – two 10W and one 90W – with the latter of these also having DisplayPort functionality. This is in addition to the dedicated DisplayPort 1.4 socket, two HDMI 2.0 ports, two USB-A and one USB-B (upstream) ports. You also get a 3.5mm headphone jack to round things off.
Finally, you get a basic pair of 3-watt speakers which, as you’d expect, don’t sound particularly great, but this is almost always the case with virtually any monitor.
OSD, features, settings & warranty
On a lot of monitors we review, the software settings and features are a bit of a sideshow and often a gimmick, however with the RD320U they’re a major feature of what sets this monitor apart, and are genuinely very useful for its intended purpose.
The monitor has the full range of eyecare features: Eye Comfort 2.0, EyeSafe 2.0, Flicker-free, Low Blue light, and Reflection Free. Besides just setting the brightness manually, the monitor can use a sensor to automatically adjust the brightness in accordance with the ambient light in the room, meaning less eye strain for the user at different times of the day. Within Eye-Care settings this is labelled as B.I. Gen2 (Brightness Intelligence Gen2) which you can turn on or off. ‘Flow’ is another feature that lets you set custom color modes depending on the time of the day.
Most of this can be adjusted within the On Screen Display (OSD) menu, although you can also install and utilize Display Pilot 2 software for some additional options if you wish. The OSD is pretty much your standard fare and is relatively easy to navigate. Within it you can select from eight different ‘Color Mode’ presets, plus an additional ‘User’ setting that enables full customization. We’ll discuss these more below but the key ones to note here are the two ‘Coding’ presets (Dark Theme and Light Theme), which are specifically designed to make text and numerical data as easy to read as possible for those long coding sessions, whether you’re working on a dark or light background. Additionally there’s an ‘ePaper’ setting which turns the screen monochrome-ish to resemble something approaching what you’d find on a Kindle or something similar. One feature we haven’t come across before is Dual View – which lets you split the screen between two color presets, so you could have one half set to Coding – Dark Theme, with your coding work window located here, and the other set to sRGB mode or something else, letting you view the front end of a website or a piece of video media in more representative colors.
Other features include a KVM switch, meaning you can quickly switch between different computers attached to the same display (useful given the monitor’s intended purpose), plus HiDPI for macOS users, that prevents scaling issues if you’re using Mac machines as well as improving text clarity.
Screen testing & performance
We conducted our usual series of tests on the monitor using DisplayCAL software.
Color gamut
BenQ claims 100% sRGB / 98% DCI-P3 gamut coverage but our results (as seen above) fell slightly short of this with 100% sRGB / 95% DCI-P3 / 90.6% Adobe RGB being the best we attainted. Results using most of the standard presets were not great, but when we selected the ‘User’ preset and manually set the RGB values (R:100, G:100, B:98, Brightness: 17) we recorded the above. Based on these results, you could definitely use the monitor for professional grade, color-based workflows within the sRGB space, and could possibly do amateur work within DCI-P3; we wouldn’t recommend it for anything in Adobe RGB however.
Color accuracy, contrast, gamma & brightness
The table below outlines all the display presets we tested, selected from the monitor’s OSD. For each we recorded readings for white point, black level, contrast ratio, average ΔE*00 (which indicates color accuracy), gamma, and brightness. The first row shows the ideal/target/reference values for these measurements – these serve as technical benchmarks rather than indicators of which settings you might personally find most appealing.
| Monitor preset | white | black | contrast | average deltaE*00 | max deltaE*00 | gamma | recorded luminance | brightness setting |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IDEAL | 6500K | 0 cd/m2 | infinity:1 | <2.00 | 2.2 | |||
| Coding – Light Theme | 6314K | 0.0602 cd/m2 | 1988.8:1 | 4.64 | 8.77 | 2.64 | 119.85cd/m2 | 18 |
| M-book | 7807K | 0.1994 cd/m2 | 1774.2:1 | 2.56 | 7.84 | 2.16 | 353.53cd/m2 | 100 |
| Cinema | 8012K | 0.2007 cd/m2 | 1711.4:1 | 4.39 | 11.58 | 2.33 | 343.62cd/m2 | 100 |
| Game | 7076K | 0.2033 cd/m2 | 1784.6:1 | 3.81 | 8.73 | 2.33 | 362.91cd/m2 | 100 |
| ePaper | 4997K | 0.0933 cd/m2 | 1267.6:1 | 23.17 | 52.33 | 3.31 | 118.41cd/m2 | 21 |
| sRGB | 6771K | 0.1232 cd/m2 | 1990.6:1 | 0.61 | 3.72 | 2.18 | 244.86cd/m2 | 43 |
Looking at the above results ‘Coding – Dark Theme’ proved unreadable by our testing device, which is not a negative critique, just that the changes in luminance values were too small to be readable. Looking at the other presets the best from an accuracy standpoint (unsurprisingly) was sRGB, which scored well in terms of contrast, gamma, and in particular the deltaE*00 scores, which were hugely impressive. An average deltaE*00 below 2.00 is good enough for professional color accuracy, so a score of 0.61 is very good indeed. The white point reading under this preset was okay at 6771K, and the black point was reasonable for an IPS monitor. BenQ claim a contrast ration of 2000:1 for this display and 1990.6:1 is close enough.
Moving onto brightness, the highest we recorded was 390.29cd/m² in SDR mode, under the User preset, with the brightness bar set to 100%. The lowest we recorded on this preset was 56.96cd/m², and 120cd/m² (the standardised approximation of natural light) was achieved at a brightness setting of 17%.
Panel uniformity
The final test we conduct within DisplayCAL is for panel uniformity. This measures how evenly color and brightness are replicated across the display within a 5×5 grid, with the middle cell serving as the reference point and the variance of all the others measured from this.
Cells with an average variance below 1.00 appear in green on the grid below, which is the ideal result – indicating a difference so small it’s invisible to the human eye. Any cells appearing yellow will have an average variance of between 1.00-3.00, which could still be undetectable to the untrained eye at the lower end of this range, although become more noticeable the closer you get to 3.00 Still, lower results in the yellow range won’t typically prevent the monitor being used for color-accurate work. A degree of variance above 3.00 shows up in shades of red and poses a much bigger issue however.
Looking at the image above, the majority of the screen scored very well, with green cells below a 1.00 variance. The top right edge showed average variance results between 1.01-1.20, which are definitely all acceptable. Of the four cells in the bottom left that showed up yellow, on the very cornermost one showed an average variance above 2.00, specifically 2.68.
Taken as a whole, none of these scores would prohibit the monitor from being used for professional grade color work unless it’s at the very highest end of the industry. That being said, do keep in mind that results can vary between individual units of the same model of monitor due to the so-called ‘panel lottery’. We can get a rough indication of what sort of variance you can expect if you purchase this monitor, but each one could perform either better or worse than the example tested.
Viewing angles
The claimed viewing angle is 178° and we found this to be more or less correct. On IPS panel monitors this isn’t normally a problem, and we found the RD320U to be a decent performer in this area, with no significant drop of image quality until you get to the 178° point.
General performance & productivity
We gave the BenQ RD320U a spin in various productivity scenarios, looking at text and lines of web code on dark and white backgrounds with the various setting options. The ‘Coding – Dark Theme’ and ‘Coding – Light Theme’ proved useful for their intended purpose; although they did make other visual media like the front-end of websites, videos, or other imagery look less than great, which could prove a problem if you want to separate your screen and look at something else while writing code, this is where the aforementioned ‘Dual View’ feature comes in where you can split the screen between two visual presets – so well done BenQ on solving this. ePaper was also a good option for a spot of eBook reading, and the MoonHalo LED ring on the reverse of the monitor was a nice feature for working the dark.
We found the nano matte to do its job well, and we didn’t suffer much from glare at all, even in our brightly lit office. The max brightness was also more than sufficient for both general productivity and when watching video media, which still had reasonable pop on the brighter presets like ‘M-book’ despite the matte finish. Though you won’t get the same impressive visual experience when viewing still images or video as you would on a glossy OLED panel, the boosted contrast on this IPS panel display does improve it beyond what you’d typically find on similar programming monitors, improving the flexibility of this screen.
Text clarity was very good – not quite as sharp as you’d find on a smaller-size 4K monitor with higher PPI, but the higher contrast ratio on this particular IPS, when combined with the specialized presets and other settings, more than makes up for it in making text/code/numerical data clearly legible.
Finally, the great array of connectivity options are a boon for productivity, with ample power delivery for your different devices and the ability to set up an additional USB hub.
Final Word: is the BenQ RD320U worth buying?
The BenQ RD320U does what it sets out to do very well indeed, although there are a couple of critiques we have of it which prevent it from getting the maximum score, none of these are particularly major. It’s terrific for viewing lines of code, written text, or dreams of numerical data clearly in different lighting conditions for hours on end, with the least impact on your eyes. The high sRGB color-accuracy also makes it suitable for creative color work in this space. Connectivity options are top notch.
The biggest drawbacks of this display are the price, and the 60Hz refresh rate limitation, either of which could be forgiven if the other wasn’t an issue. PPI admittedly isn’t as good as you’d get with smaller-sized 4K monitors, so if high Pixels Per Inch is crucial for you, you may want to look at the BenQ RD280U instead which has similar features, though it won’t match the contrast and color replication of this display.
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