How to Choose a Monitor for Creative Professionals? BenQ PD vs SW Series

BenQ’s SW series monitors have been famed among professional photographers around the world for years. They’re widely considered the best and most accurate monitors for photography workflows.

While SW monitors are primarily designed for photographers, they’re great for anyone who needs dependable and uncompromising color consistency and accuracy, from camera to monitor and then to hardcopy. Both SW and PD models are factory calibrated for color accuracy. The SW series goes beyond that to include a 16-bit hardware 3D LUT (look up table) for more sophisticated and professional color calibration and tweaking. Advanced users often get a lot of benefit from such advanced features. BenQ exclusive software Palette Master Element offers a convenient but powerful toolset for user color calibration on the SW series, helping professionals fine tune displays to match their needs.

SW series monitors further have the ability to store 16-bit 3D LUT calibration results on the hardware level, or on the monitor itself. That frees calibration profiles from PC graphics hardware, creating greater consistency, as graphics cards and chips often affect color profiles.

Another difference is wide gamut, with the SW series offering 99% coverage of Adobe RGB, which is still the most popular color space in photography. However, as you can see in the table above, the PD series has strong coverage of DCI-P3, making it very suitable for Mac usage.

The SW series with its 99% Adobe RGB coverage offers excellent support for workflows that emphasize printing, because hard copies come out looking nearly identical to their display versions. This prevents unwanted surprises when producing prints of projects. In addition to Adobe RGB, the SW series supports 100% sRGB and has dedicated modes like black and white. SW series models also work with BenQ Paper Color Sync, which is a free download. The software ensures the right image parameters are used for specific printers and even paper types, and offers previews so professionals know exactly what to expect. Currently Paper Color Sync works best with BenQ SW321C monitors, as they use premium A.R.T panels that were developed specifically to simulate the look and texture of paper on the screen. These are by far the best monitors in the world for people that want to ensure an image goes from monitor to print in the most “what you see is what you get” way possible.