BenQ 27" FHD Monitor | GW2790T

Usually at this price you get a TN panel with lousy viewing angles and washed out colors. This IPS monitor has much wider viewing angles and much better color than typical TN monitors. The thin bezels and overall understated look are also nice. You also 2 digital inputs (HDMI and DP) plus analog which is more than most monitors of any type of this size and price. And it's nice it's certified flicker free and has low blue modes that work well. It also runs quite cool and is very energy efficient. And having a standard 100x100 VESA mount is also nice. Now for the bad news. The menu system is needlessly complicated and more like what monitors had 15 years ago. They went to the trouble to give you custom assignable buttons except they're not one touch access, and you're limited to what you can assign each button to. You first have to hit any button (but be careful not the hit the power switch in the same row or you'll shut the monitor off--the buttons are essentially unlabed) to bring up an on screen menu of what the assignable buttons do. Then you can hit the button you want, then you often have to either hit it multiple times or use the arrow buttons to navigate to what you're trying to get to. So much for quick access. Using the regular menus dives even deeper into button pressing frustration. So if you had fantasies about saying assigning Button 1 to be the HDMI input and Button 2 to be the Display Port input think again. You press any button (except power), then the button programed to be Input (which can ONLY be button 2), then you press again one or more times to select the input you want round-robin-style, then you press the "check mark" (apply) button. So what could have been one press of a single button instead requires up to 5 presses of multiple buttons. It's typical Taiwanese/Chinese poor user interface design. Auto brightness is really useful and reduces eye strain but the "Eye Care Bright Intelligence" has been rendered all but useless by more poor design. Every time the monitor detects the slightest change in ambient light it pops up a rather large annoying graphic with a stupid large eye on it in the lower right corner for a good 5 or 10 seconds to tell you it ever so slightly adjusted the brightness! Even with the sensitivity turned all the way down, even just the reflection of what's being displayed (say a screen with lots of white vs a dark screen) while wearing a light colored shirt triggers these frequent and highly annoying pop ups. Really BenQ? Why they had to ruin a perfectly good feature by constantly "advertising" it I'll never understand. Also, while the color gamut and dynamic range of this monitor is better than most TN panels, it falls far short short of what you want for serious photo and/or video editing. The backlight uniformity is also not all that great with some bleed and halo effect. In these regards you get what you pay for. But there's no excuse for the auto brightness pop up. The could have just left some code out of the firmware and it would be a great feature but instead they made it so annoying I doubt many will use it.