I tested the PA32UCDM’s brightness, contrast ratio, and color-gamut coverage using our standard test gear: a Klein K-10A colorimeter, a Murideo SIX-G 8K test-pattern generator, and Portrait Displays’ Calman for Business calibration software.
Asus lists the PA32UCDM’s average luminance at 250 nits (candelas per meter squared); it tallied 351 nits when I tested it in standard (SDR) mode, the same reading I got in HDR mode. Asus claims a peak HDR brightness of 1,000 nits, and it tested just short of that (962 nits), about 100 nits brighter than its peak SDR brightness.
When I first tested the ProArt’s luminance, with the monitor’s brightness set to 100%, I got a much lower reading—less than 200 nits—in all of the color modes I tried. Remembering a similar situation with another monitor, I checked the PA32UCDM’s OSD settings and saw that the Uniform Brightness setting was enabled. When I turned it off, I got the higher luminance readings noted above. However, Asus makes a case for keeping this setting turned on in some situations, such as switching between or changing the size of windows with vastly different contrast levels. The company notes that the setting keeps brightness levels consistent with up to 250 nits for more accurate colors and more comfortable hours-long viewing sessions.
As for contrast ratio, Asus rates the PA32UCDM at 1,500,000:1. Because contrast ratio represents the difference between a display’s brightest white and darkest black, and an OLED screen can simply turn blocks of pixels off—creating a true black—theoretically OLED monitors should have an infinite contrast ratio. In testing, the reading I got was a “mere” 717 billion to one. Suffice it to say that the PA32UCDM does great in rendering detail in both bright and dark areas.
Asus rates the PA32UCDM’s color coverage at 100% for the sRGB space and 99% for DCI-P3. In my testing, it covered the full sRGB space (actually, 151% by area), 97.3% of DCI-P3 (see the chromaticity chart below), and 95.7% of Adobe RGB.
(Credit: Portrait Displays)
Our final benchmark for creator-centric monitors is Delta E (dE), a measure of color accuracy, namely the difference between the hue of a displayed color and the color input that the monitor received. The dE figure that appears in monitor specs is the average of a large number of individual color readings from across the spectrum; the lower the value, the more accurate the color. An average dE of below 2 indicates color accurate enough that a casual observer may be unable to distinguish any variation between the color on screen and the intended (source) color.
Asus claims a (dE) of less than 1 for the PA32UCDM. It turned in a dE of 2 in my out-of-the-box (without calibration) testing, which is our standard procedure. This is similar to the results we got when testing the Asus ProArt PA32DC: an out-of-the-box dE of 1.9. That monitor has a built-in colorimeter, and using it, we lowered the dE to 1.5. The PA32UCDM has no such tool; the aforementioned Asus calibration utility is compatible with calibrators from Klein, Datacolor, and X-Rite. If absolute-precision color matching is mandatory for what you do, you’ll want to make sure you have the proper equipment at hand to tune the PA32UCDM.
