Even pseudo HDR monitors have
improved color coverage.professional digital cinema. DisplayHDR
600 and up monitors also need to support
10-bit color reproduction courtesy of at
least dithering technology.
In short, any monitor that qualifies for
at least the DisplayHDR 600 certification
(there are more demanding DisplayHDR
1000 and 1400 standards) offers wide color
gamut coverage. There are, of course,
other standards. HDR10 is the standard
created by the Consumer Technology
Association. It’s based around the Rec.2020
color space used by UHD TVs, and if a
display conforms with HDR10, it’s in about
the same ball park for image performance
as a DisplayHDR 1000 screen.
The slight confusion, of course, is
that a given monitor may be capable of
processing HDR10 content, but not capable
of rendering its full dynamic range. But a
display capable of HDR10 content support
but not true HDR rendering, such as the
BenQ DesignVue PD3220U, will have wide
color gamut coverage. In the case of the
BenQ, it achieves 95 percent of the DCI-P3
gamut, which will be sufficient for all but
the most demanding professionals.out for a display with local dimming and a
sustained brightness of at least 600cd/m^2.
O n t h a t s u b j e c t , a s 2 0 2 0 m o v e s f o r w a r d ,
you can expect to see displays with more
local dimming zones. Early HDR monitors
had 300–400 zones. The first displays with
1,000 or more zones are now appearing—
Acer’s Predator X32 packs 1,152.
With more zones will come better HDR
visuals and fewer visual artifacts, such
as light bleed or blooming around bright
objects. Ultimately, only per-pixel lighting
will deliver perfect HDR image quality.
That isn’t going to be on offer in 2020.
Another area of improvement in 2020
will be pixel response. In 2019, the first
monitors with IPS panel tech and claimed
1ms response capability appeared in theform of LG’s Ultragear 38GL950G and
27GL850. Those were large, premium
models. By the end of 2019, AOC was
offering its own more affordable 1ms IPS
panel—the 24-inch Gaming 24G2U.
Of course, claimed response times are
notoriously unreliable metrics of real-
world pixel performance, but it’s clear
IPS panels are improving and the gap to
the fastest TN tech is closing. That’s good
news if you want speediness and color
accuracy in a single monitor. Even in the
gaming segment, TN will be increasingly
marginalized by higher quality IPS panels.
Overall, then, what will the PC monitor
look like in 2020? Condensing the key
trends into a single, notional model, sadly
it won’t beat 4K when it comes to nativeresolution. Nor will it offer a true high-DPI
experience. But it will have HDR capability,
albeit flawed, thanks to the limitations of
LCD panels, which in turn means it won’t
be OLED, much less microLED.
It will also offer a wider and more
accurate range of colors. It’ll be faster
by pretty much every metric, be that pixel
response or refresh rates. It’ll be pretty
much any size or shape you desire. Its
features will play ball with both AMD and
Nvidia graphics cards. And it will hook
up to your PC with bandwidth to spare
via a single cable providing the display
signal, peripheral data, and, if you need it,
charging power. The monitor of 2020 isn’t
quite everything we’d hoped for, then, but
it’s a pretty fine thing all the same.Stop that, it’s silly: Asus’s new 360Hz gaming monitor. Micro LED could be the next big thing, but not in 2020.maximumpc.com MAR 2020 MAXIMUMPC 49
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