BenQ MA320U

Introduction

The BenQ MA320U aims to offer the power of a big, detailed screen for MacBooks for a cut price.

At £599.99/$599.99, it’s a much more affordable panel than Apple’s own Studio Display, and offers the fundamentals of a great productivity monitor for use with their laptops as a 32-inch 4K IPS panel with USB-C power delivery, HDMI and more besides.

It certainly looks to be a compelling choice against Apple’s option and the Philips 27B1U7903, a smaller 27-inch 4K Mini LED choice that retails for a little more than BenQ’s option. I’ve been testing the MA320U for the last few weeks to see how well it performs and whether it’s one of the best monitors we’ve tested.

Design

• Silver, Apple-inspired looks
• Lots of useful stand adjustments
• Good array of ports

The MA320U certainly takes a lot of design cues from Apple, with a two-tone silver and black chassis, as well as an especially thick and sturdy metal base. It looks rather modern, with thin bezels around the screen.

It’s remarkably easy to put together, with the arm slotting into the back of the monitor without any need for tools, while the base screws into the bottom of the arm with its own threading. You can be set up in a matter of minutes.

Adjustment on the stand is pretty good too, with good scope for swivel, tilt, pivot and height adjustment. It will also swing round into a portrait orientation if you want to use the MA320U as an especially large second screen. You’ll just want to make sure you’ve raised it all the way up, as otherwise you’ll leave a hefty scratch on the stand itself. The screen is also 100×100 VESA compatible if you want to shift it to a third-party arm.

As for ports, the MA320U is well-suited for use with modern MacBooks and ultrabooks, with a powerful USB-C port that can support up to 90W of power delivery and 4K video output over one port to keep cable clutter to a minimum. It also comes with a pair of HDMI ports, and a two port USB-A hub, alongside another USB-C for 15W of downstream power. And a headphone jack. The ports, as with Apple’s iMacs, are on the back of the monitor, making them less obstructed than they are on the underside, as is found on most screens.

Where this panel is lacking against more expensive productivity panels is the lack of other advanced things such as a KVM for controlling multiple devices with one set of peripherals. This is one area where the brand’s more premium PD3225U wins, even if it is nearly double the price.

Image Quality 

• Brilliant colour accuracy
• Punchy brightness, but middling contrast and black level
• Great in day-to-day use

The MA320U doesn’t spring any surprises in terms of its configuration, opting for a big 32-inch 4K IPS screen to provide fantastic detail across a larger area with a respectable panel type. A 60Hz refresh rate isn’t going to make it as silky smooth as the higher 120Hz screens on ProMotion-supporting MacBook Pro screen, but it does the job.

Using my trusty colorimeter, I measured this BenQ screen to provide some fantastic colour accuracy that virtually matches the claimed specs, with 100% coverage of the sRGB colour space, meaning we’re getting perfect colours for mainstream, productivity workloads, while the 95% DCI-P3 and 87% Adobe RGB results also help to prove that the MA320U is a solid choice for more creative workloads, too.

The MA320U can get pretty bright too, with a peak SDR brightness of 495.5 nits, giving displayed images a certain punch. With this in mind, its 0.29 black level at half brightness and a contrast ratio of 1210:1 aren’t the most impressive, and it can leave darker colours lacking that certain inkiness that you get from other, more premium screens.

There is HDR support here, with the MA320U supporting both Display HDR 600 for a little more potency in supported content, as well as the basic HDR10.

I was generally impressed by using it over USB-C with my MacBook Pro, with a convenient one-cable connection, as well as its accurate colours helping the little bit of photo editing I do day to day, while it also presented some solid detail thanks to its 4K resolution across that larger screen.

Software and Features

• OSD settings are majorly app-controlled
• Speakers are quite crummy

The built-in OSD of the MA320U is quite a basic affair, offering the bare minimum for volume, brightness and input selection that’s accessible through a joystick under the front of the monitor. All of the more advanced settings are found within BenQ’s Display Pilot software, available for both macOS and Windows.

With the software, it sits neatly in your Windows taskbar, and provides quick access to features such as HDR support, different colour modes and brightness. It prevents the usual squirrelling around in poorly optimised OSDs with buttons or a joystick to find the setting you want.

You can even map the monitor’s brightness to the dedicated shortcut buttons on your MacBook or Windows laptop, if you want to control the bigger screen without delving into another menu. I had no trouble using it with my MacBook Pro over the main USB-C port, although it will also pass settings through over HDMI.

There are speakers with the MA320U, although, as with lots of other monitor speakers, they offer audio that’s barely passable for more than extremely casual listening. They get plenty loud, although they have no depth or definition to them – you’ll want to utilise the monitor’s headphone output for hooking up some dedicated speakers.

Should you buy it?

FAQs