ASUS PA246Q offers a really good value at the price of Rs. 29,000 especially since it is a professional grade monitor, which generally cost much higher. The image quality is top notch, HD movie viewing experience is quite good except for the minor backlight bleeding. Also features such as Quick Fit button, connectivity ports, exhaustive tweaking options work in its favour. A recommended monitor for those looking at a budget professional grade monitor.
Design and Features
Out of the box, the ASUS PA246Q comes across as a very bulky monitor with a very sturdy stand. The monitor uses CCFL backlighting and houses the power unit on the rear side. The monitor is surrounded by a matte black bezel. You can adjust the height of the monitor stand, make the monitor tilt in both directions, and it can also pivot from landscape to portrait mode. The monitor has cm,inches markings all around its bezel, in the rear side of the stand, on the circular rotating base, which may add to the professional feel, but we don't think they serve any purpose.
The monitor has a matte finish so you do not have to deal with the unwanted reflections, which are common on glossy monitors. Native resolution of the monitor is 1920×1200 pixel and it comes with the 16:10 aspect ratio which gives more vertical space to work with. This comes in handy when working on professional applications and even for office work with spreadsheets.
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The monitor buttons located on the bottom right hand corner have a good feedback and you can even operate them blindly once you get the hang of their positioning. The Quick Fit button is particularly impressive as it tends to overlay a sort of a grid on top of the monitor. It has a preset of centimeter mode and inches mode – which look as if a graph paper has been superimposed on your screen. You also have sizes such as 4×6, 5×7, 8×10, A4, Letter, etc which are commonly used by imaging professionals.
The on-screen display has many options to play around with. It comes with as many as six preset modes including an Adobe RGB, sRGB mode along with a User mode. The six axis colour adjustment option allows you to adjust individual colours without affecting other colours is quite good. Connectivity options include HDMI, DVI, D-Sub as well as DisplayPort and it has a 7-in-1 card reader along with two USB ports. The display ports are recessed, so connecting them is a bit of a task.
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Visit next page to read about ASUS PA246Q's performance and our verdict…
Performance
Out of the box, the monitor looks quite good. The options in the OSD are quite good in most cases, but for sRGB and Adobe RGB modes, you lose out on some colour temp, saturation, contrast options. We used the Spyder3Elite colorimeter to determine the contrast ratio. At 50 per cent brightness and 75 percent contrast in the User mode, we got a contrast ratio of 526:1. You can tweak the calibrations to your liking.
It passed most of the Lagom.nl tests, which tests various aspects of a calibrated monitor. The monitor's black to white gradient level was quite good with only a slightly greenish tinge on the darker bands. The colour bands were distinctly visible across all colours gradients. Only in the Inversion test which involves various moire patterns on the screen did we notice some flickering in 2 out of 11 tests. Text was rendered very well.
Watching full HD content on the PA246Q is a joy. The matte screen gives a beautiful output. Although we did not find the blacks to be very deep, there was some backlight bleeding there. But the overall scene was rendered quite well with skin tones looking quite good. There was absolutely no banding or noise in the solid coloured areas.
Gaming on the monitor was quite impressive. We did not experience any lags or frame drops while playing fast paced games such as NFS: The Run. The fantasy world of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim really came to life and we quite loved the detailing.
Verdict
ASUS PA246Q offers a really good value at the price of Rs. 29,000 especially since it is a professional grade monitor, which generally cost much higher. The image quality is top notch, HD movie viewing experience is quite good except for the minor backlight bleeding. Also features such as Quick Fit button, connectivity ports, exhaustive tweaking options work in its favour. A recommended monitor for those looking at a budget professional grade monitor.
Price: Rs. 29,000
CONTACT :
ASUS Technology Pvt Ltd
Phone: 1800 209 0365
Email: reachus@asus.com
Website: www.asus.in
