Screen Quality and On-Screen Display

When it comes to screen quality, there is no discernable difference between the ASUS PB287Q and the Samsung U28D590D when looking at them side by side. Both are built on the same panel technology and both have the same viewing angle concerns that I addressed in my review of the Samsung monitor earlier in the month. As I said then:

Viewing angles are going to be much lower, and you'll see color shifting moving around the display on your desk. While this is true in both horizontal and vertical angles, the most apparent issue happens with vertical viewing angles.

Notice the center of the Windows logo and its inverse color shift. Using the monitor in a desktop environment you will likely see much less color shift as you move and rotate around your desk, but it will be there. To be clear though, the performance of this TN panel is better than most of the other TN panels I or our anyone on our team has seen previously. At CES we got to see this monitor in person, and both Allyn and Josh (discerning monitor users) noted that while not perfect, the U28D590D was exceptional for a TN monitor.

The comments still stand with the ASUS PB287Q and if you are dedicated IPS user then you will without a doubt see a difference when migrating to either of these options. The benefit that the ASUS screen offers Samsung though is that you have more adjustment options (height, angle, tilt) to give you the optimal viewing angle.

The ASUS PB287Q On-Screen Display

The menus and options available with the OSD on the ASUS PB287Q are great and are improved over what Samsung offered as well.

Pressing any of the buttons will first bring up this menu that allows you quickly access two customizable buttons (PIP/PBP and Splendid in this shot) or dive into the primary menu with a wide gamut of settings.

Plenty of color adjustments, gamma adjustments and more are made available to help customize the and calibrate the monitor for your use. Inside the ASUS Splendid menu you'll find presets for a ton of different modes including one aimed at sRGB development. 

Just as we found on the Samsung panel, the ASUS PB287Q includes support for PiP (picture in picture) and PbP (picture by picture). PiP allows you to combine two inputs (DP or HDMI) to allow for a screen inside the screen. It can exist in a native 1080p unscaled form in any quadrant or can be resized accordingly. Picture by picture allows you to have dual 1920×2160 screens (both on HDMI or a combination of HDMI and DisplayPort) if you happen to want to different machines working at the same time.

I did have one setup hiccup when testing out the PB287Q initially – the screen was only recognized as a DP 1.1 capable system, limiting me to 30 Hz refresh rates. Apparently that is a bug with the initialization with NVIDIA drivers prior to 337.50 (337.88 fixes this going forward) and I had to go into the menu and enable DP 1.2 manually. Upon doing so, 60 Hz was enabled and the experience was great. Good on AMD for having this ready to go prior to the SST monitors shipping!

Finally, here is the portion of the OSD that allows us to set the two shortcut keys. Options include brightness, contrast, PiP/PbP and more so you can set them to the options you use most often. A very nice addition!

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