[sabby]

Hi. My first post.

I just bought a 4k Dell U3225QE to replace the 11 year old 1440p Asus PB278Q on my spouse’s computer that has developed a flaky on/off switch. We liked that monitor a lot. The display was fine, but it could take a minute of fiddling to get it to power on. Time to replace it.

I thought a 4k monitor in a larger size, going from the old 2k 27 inch to a 4k 32 inch, would be a nice upgrade. I also have an Asus P258Q 25-inch 2k monitor for my computer, and it is every bit as nice as the PB278Q that is failing.

Neither my spouse nor I play computer games. I played Pong on my 256K IBM PC back in the ’80s, but nothing since then. I’m a software developer and a Linux user since the mid ’90s. My spouse enjoys photo editing, genealogy, language studies, and casual content consumption on Windows.

We thought the difference between the Dell U3225QE and the Asus PB278Q that it is replacing would blow us away. It doesn’t. There is some faintly detectable improvement in image sharpness on the 4K display compared to the 2k display, but it is subtle. In normal use, it’s imperceptible unless we examine the same image on both displays simultaneously. For casual use, we don’t notice much difference when viewing movies, 2k or 4k YouTube videos, or photo galleries on one or the other display. Blacks are good on the new Dell, but no better than the blacks on the old Asus P278Q.

I’m wondering if there are any settings I can tweak to get better looking output. When I first connected it, my spouse’s Windows 11 system automatically detected the model and set the scaling to a recommended 150% and resolution to a recommended 4k. All good. But I had enabled the ambient light adjustment setting on the monitor during setup, and that was a mistake. And Window set the refresh rate to 60% by default. Also not good. The display was washed out, dim, and blurry with those settings.

So I changed the refresh rate to 120Hz and turned off the auto-brightness adjustment, adjusted it manually, and that helped tremendously. It made the display about as good as our old PB278Q. But we want more out of it. For a 4k monitor at this price point, I think it should produce better looking output than our 11 year old 2k ASUS PB278Q.

The video card in the Windows 11 system is an 8GB Nvidia RTX 3050. I believe it is regarded as an level gaming card, rated to support 4k display. But again, we’re not playing games. Just doing non-video taxing content consumption, for the most par.

Are there any other settings I can tweak to differentiate this unspectacular 4k display from the roughly equivalent 2k display it is replacing?

[PCM2]

Hi sabby,

Monitors are very subjective and how much you’d notice the difference between a 27″ 2560 x 1440 (QHD or 1440p – avoid referring to it as ‘2K’) model and a 31.5″ ‘4K’ UHD model is going to be quite individual. Depending on eyesight, viewing distance, how you filter visual information and simply expectations. You’re comparing a pixel density of ~109 PPI to ~140 PPI or roughly a 28% increase in pixel density. So if you’re expecting things to look “twice as good” from a monitor with similar base technology then you might be setting yourself up for disappointment. Matte screen surfaces will also limit how much of an edge in sharpness you might perceive as they diffuse text and other elements of the image. There aren’t any specific additional settings you would tweak to improve things, aside from checking you’ve optimised Windows ClearType correctly.

On the contrast side the same applies regarding subjectivity and expectations. Depending on lighting it may be difficult to perceive the difference between a Samsung PLS display (like a ‘regular IPS’) and enhanced contrast ‘IPS Black’ panel. It isn’t like ‘IPS Black’ contrast is spectacular by any means (~2100:1 in this case), even if it is measurably better and in some lighting and for some content this difference could be perceived. There’s also still ‘IPS glow’ which can affect perceived black depth regardless of what a device might measure for central black depth directly in front of the screen.

P.S. Your monitor is presumably a PB278Q (post corrected based on this assumption)

[sabby]

Hi PCM2, thank you for your response and for the detailed information.

You are right, the old 27 inch monitor is PB278Q. I also have a PB258Q. We’ve really enjoyed using these monitors for years. I’ll try not to call them 2K monitors again. 🙂 It’s imprecise for sure, and that’s a good enough reason to avoid that designation.

We observed this morning that backing up a bit further from the new Dell UHD monitor improved our perception of it’s sharpness. Viewing distance from the PB278Q was about 3 feet. Backing away to 4 feet for the 32″ monitor not only improved our perception of sharpness, but also color (not sure why that is). Maybe most importantly, it allowed us to take in the full view of the screen without shifting our eyes from side to side. We weren’t even conscious of having to shift our vision at the shorter viewing distance until we backed away, at which point we both immediately noticed, felt really, the difference.

Sadly, the size of the desk and the available space we have isn’t going to accommodate the extra distance needed. We’re thinking that 27″ is optimal (for us) with the space we have, so I’m now going to have to start my research again to choose a UHD monitor in that size.

[Author]

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