My wife is a nurse whose new job requires her to do a lot of documentation home, which was awkward and cumbersome on her teeny MacBook Air. I wanted to set up a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to function as a docking workstation. The only option from Apple is the $999 (!!) Thunderbolt display. That seemed like a ridiculous price, particularly considering we don't need the expansion ports, so I went looking for cheaper alternatives.
It was very hard for me to reconcile the low price of this unit with the glowing reviews, but even adding $10 for a Thunderbolt to HDMI cable, we were still well under a quarter of the price, so I figured it was worth a try - guessing there was a about a 50% chance I would send it right back. That's definitely not going to happen.
I use a Thunderbolt at work, so I can directly compare the two. The resolution of the BenQ is of course significantly lower (1920x1080 vs. 2650x1440), so it's not really apples to apples (did I mention it's < 1/4 of the price?); however, that's enough for what she's using it for, and she would probably use that resolution anyway, to reduce eye strain. The color is every bit as good, and it's lighter and slimmer. There's also significantly less glare. There's nothing cheap-looking about the construction. It's solid and has a nice vertical pivot mount. Time will tell how well it holds up, but it at least appears well made.
The one quirk that some other reviews have mentioned is that it doesn't auto-detect the input. You have to select the HDMI input (the first time) using the menu buttons, or it will just sit there for a minute and shut itself off. Reading some of the negative reviews, I suspect some people never figured this out and just assumed the monitor was bad. Once the correct input was selected, the Mac correctly detected it and everything worked perfectly.
It (surprisingly) has built-in speakers, but they aren't very good. They can use the HDMI audio directly, but if you do that, there's no soft volume control, so you have to adjust the volume with the menu buttons or pre-fade it with the app playing the music, which is a little clumsy. If sound is important to you, you'll definitely want to use separate amplified speakers (you can buy some *really* good speakers with some of the money you just saved).
Bottom line: if you're looking for a good monitor, and 1080p resolution is enough for you, you can't do better than this one.
| Standing screen display size | 27 Inches |
|---|---|
| Screen Resolution | 1920x1080 |
| Max Screen Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
