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The best programming monitor, what in the late stage capitalism is this? From BenQ, this is the RD280UG. UG for ug, like It's a 3x2 aspect ratio monitor. Okay, that kind of has my attention. And uh somebody I've been hanging out with on the forum swears by these. And so I reached out to bank and they sent me one to take a look at for a review. Uh but what I found was kind of surprising. So let's take a look at the monitor specs and what a display clarity powers programming like packaging the monitor in this way. It really is a monitor that's designed to be looked at 8 12 16 hours a day, such is the life of the programmer.
We're all just trying to eke out a living here, so let's let's see what we got. First in the box is the quick start guide, which explains how to unpack it from the box properly. Then we've got the warranty card and some other things. Uh and a cleaning cloth. This is the foot. Standard power cord. You also got an HDMI, USB, and a USB-C to C, and a USB 3 uh A to B. You've also got the HDMI cable. Look, the HDMI consortium really wants you to have the holographic sticker on here because there's extra cost in getting it certified because HDMI certification doesn't really mean much. Sorry. Look at that. It's got a little faux leather, it's plastic but with a leatherish texture cable thingy on the back. That's pretty fun.
Now the correct way to deal with these monitors and all monitors like this is to do that. This has the standard 100 mil VESA mounting bracket, which is great. Now, BenQ programming series. It's got a nice flat top, but I think they missed an opportunity to add a quarter thread so that you could have a webcam. You can mount a webcam to the stand. That'd be pretty cool. As it is, the top surface area of the display, you can just set one here. It's not as cool as mounting it to the stand. 3x2 aspect ratio in portrait, huh? See what I'm talking about here? One very rare feature is that it can rotate on the stand 180 either way. It does not rotate 360.
Not that you would expect it to. Now, the ports on this monitor are really kind of interesting before we get to the specs. There's a Kensington lock port, so if you're using this in a commercial scenario, front desk, you know, where you need lockability, uh you can physically lock it down. That's fine. Uh it has a standard power connector, power input. There's no separate power brick or anything like that. There are two USB-C connections and a USB Type-B 3.1 connection, full-size DisplayPort and HDMI, and they do sort of jut straight out the back.
This is not fabulous in the scenario where your cables are tied up and you rotate the display. If the cables went in here instead, it'll be a mechanical stress side to side. Instead, this is sort of the worst mechanical stress on the cable if you have the cables tied against the back. So, be warned that you might crunch the ports if there's not enough slack on your cables if you rotate between portrait and landscape. I would suggest setting up the monitor in the mode you plan to use it on, and once the cables are connected, don't rotate it. While it's rotated, you can also see the ports on the bottom here, two USB Type-A and one USB-C. This is fantastic. Yes, this monitor does have built-in KVM
functionality. It's got a couple little quirks that we'll talk about, but it is of delivering up to 90 watts charging, which we'll test with my GPD Win laptop in just a second. There is a sensor on the front. The sensor on the front helps with things like automatically adjusting brightness and contrast. You can, of course, turn that off. BenQ also has software that you can load on your laptop or Windows software that you can load on your laptop that will help drive the display or your desktop machine. I would recommend it for a desktop computer, but not so much for a laptop. It doesn't really do a lot, in my opinion, and mostly I use Linux, so it's not really relevant for me anyway. You can configure via the on-screen display
if you want the USB-C port to charge when the monitor is off, when it's in standby, when it's on, none of the above. So, that's nice to see. Now, there are a lot of features in the on-screen display that control little details about the ergonomics, like the LEDs you can turn off if you don't want the distraction of the light. There's also a light in the back of the monitor that's like the moonlight, the moon ring. You can turn that on or off, but it provides ambient light behind the display, which can actually help if you're in a darker room and you want light coming from something other
than the monitor. Bouncing light off of your wall can be pretty ergonomically nice, and the light on the back of the monitor is pretty bright. Now, the rear light, you know, it is white light, but white light has a lot of different color temperatures, and it is programmable from a nice warm light to a daylight, you know, blue tint brightness. There's also options for picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture. Picture-by-picture you can configure to split the display evenly in left and right halves or a 2:1 ratio or even a 3:1 ratio for two different inputs. Really, the KVM feature and the picture-by-picture feature are meant for using with a combination laptop desktop, a USB-C device where you've got a combination
USB and display port on the one side and something that's native display port or HDMI on the other side. It wouldn't make sense to use the KVM feature with say HDMI for one of the KVM ports and DisplayPort for the other one. [snorts] I've got my GPD Win 2023 laptop hooked up to the display via USB-C. And the on-screen display does give me the option to toggle between USB 3.2 and USB 2.0. You should understand what that does. There's four high-speed pair on a USB-C cable. In USB 3.2 mode, two of those pair are used for USB and two of those are used for display. The reason you might not want to do that is in USB 2 mode, all four go for the display. And this thing does support 120 Hz. 120 Hz
even over USB-C, which is very nice, very easy on the eyes. There's a lot of ergonomic features for this monitor, not just the LEDs and the lights and everything else. They've obviously put a lot of thought into the ergonomics. When you run all four pair, all four high-speed pair with the display, you only have a couple of low-speed channels left and one of them is used for USB 2. So, 480 megabit on the USB 2 side of things if you're in that mode and that's the mode that it comes in by default. Now, one quirk that I ran into is out of the box on the on-screen display, it doesn't do USB-C charging when the monitor is in standby or when it is off.
I had to toggle that on in the on-screen display because when I started with my GPD Win laptop, it was dead. And so, I was in kind of this impossible situation where my laptop wouldn't charge because the monitor was asleep. But I could turn the monitor on and go into like the menus where it's telling me that there's no input, but then the monitor the laptop would charge enough to let me turn it on. But because the battery was dead, it took me a little bit to get the laptop to come on. There's also another quirk with the sleep mode and that is when I have our um I had a desktop machine hooked up uh a System76 uh Mira machine that I'm going to review separately. And this is kind of the ultimate Linux setup, right?
We've got our awesome desktop machine, and I've got a laptop connected, and it's on the display, and everything is working great. 120 Hz across all the inputs, switch back and forth, use the KVM feature. All that stuff's fantastic. The problem is that if both of them are asleep, it can be difficult to get the monitor to wake up the way that you want it to. And that's just a quirk of the KVM feature in the monitor. Otherwise, the KVM feature in this monitor is more well put together than most KVM features in most monitors. I think BenQ has spent some time thinking about the firmware, not just from the ergonomic standpoint, but also the actual usability.
Now, it also has this like simulated paper mode, like e-ink mode, where it messes with the contrast, and that's okay. It's a certain look. It looks a certain way. It's not bad for programming. I get it why it's here. It might be your thing. It wasn't my thing. The touch bar on the front also will let you quickly toggle between these different display modes. So, like if you go like head down programming mode, and you're you're wanting to turn off distractions, that's pretty nice, cuz it's a touch bar, and you just touch it, and it goes into that mode. You can also switch between three or four different modes for color, contrast, everything else.
The auto mode works surprisingly well. Under the studio lights in here, it was really impressive because it would seems to be like a true tone kind of a thing. Um I think Apple has a similar feature to this, or I've seen some other folks that prefer to develop on the Apple platform uh have that kind of contrast. In Linux and KDE Plasma, you get the option where everything just sort of turns yellow when it's after dusk, and maybe that's a little easier on the eyes. This thing seems to respond to your ambient light to do something kind of similar. And under the studio lights, it worked great.
Under not studio lights, it worked less good. I think the sensor in there, if you have low CRI lighting or you have poor lighting or a light that flickers at a certain frequency, I don't think the sensor in the monitor does a particularly good job on auto for that. I don't really blame the monitor for that. That is probably because of the lighting conditions where you are. So, if you want to use that feature and you turn it on and it doesn't work the way that you expect, try changing your light bulbs because you may have crappy light bulbs and not really realize it. 3840 by 2560 at 120 Hz on this display is quite glorious. Portrait mode with this display is also quite glorious. It is
very difficult for me to decide if I want to use this in horizontal or portrait mode. One of the main programming stations I have has three 2560 by 1440 displays in portrait mode. They're the old Shimian Korean import. There's no controller on them. They only work at 2560 by 1440. There's no hardware scalar. And this is the programming corner as you can hear from the song of my people. Although someone has swapped my keyboard. I don't know. Maybe they'll fix that on Monday. It's three 27-in monitors and I'm thinking about replacing this with two of the BenQ monitors in portrait. Cuz I really like this setup for programming.
It's not good for gaming. It's not good for anything else. But I could probably game in portrait mode on the BenQ's. That probably be fine. Wake up. These are really ancient Shimian 27-in monitors. There's a few of you left in the audience that will remember these from like 10 years ago. They've been running more or less continuously and you can see the image quality has degraded somewhat. So, these are kind of overdue for replacement. Requires dual link DVI, which is its own set of problems on modern graphics cards. Got an ancient GTX GPU in there to be able to drive three dual link DVI monitors. So, it's a little problematic
all the way around. I don't I still like those for programming setup and I'm thinking about switching that out for two of these in portrait mode instead of that because this is pretty good. I mean 3840 by 2160 versus 3840 by 2560, 3 by 2 aspect ratio. It sounds like it's not a lot of pixels, but boy it feels like a lot of pixels. I ended up liking this more than I thought I would just because of the ergonomics. Ah, there's that word again. And also the matte finish on this display is aggressive. And usually I find that the aggressiveness of the matte finish affects the sharpness. But if you look at the close-up footage I'm trying to show you here
using this as a display with sharp text, you know, like for programming for actual programming reasons, it doesn't seem to hurt the sharpness of the text as much as I would expect. So, yay for more advanced coatings, I guess. I'm also delighted to report that on Linux out of the box DDC/CI for brightness control on this display works perfectly. I didn't have to do anything. I just plugged it in and I was like, yes, I would like to control the brightness and the monitor says, no problem. There's about a 1-second delay, but you can control the brightness from Linux. Isn't that cool? Nominal power
draw at the wall according to our kilowatt is about 122 123 watts, give or take. Well, that's while it's charging the laptop. Currently the display is using 42.7 watts. That's with max brightness on the front and the rear light on, but the laptop is not charging. So, full power rundown when it's not charging it's like 42 45 watts with the rear light on plus the brightness at maximum. It's 120 watts running full tilt everything including charging my laptop at 65 watts. It supports up to 90 watts, so you could even probably go a little more than that. When it's idle, like the monitor is completely off, but the USB-C standby power is on, it is consuming about 12 watts. So, when it's off, standby, 12 watts.
FYI. Seems like a little high, but it may be because USB-C's in standby. Another feature of this monitor is called MST multi-stream. This is really useful in a laptop scenario. If you want to have a single cable going to your laptop, you connect it, and you can connect another monitor to this, and yay. The problem with that is that this is 3840 by 2560 at 120 Hz. There's really not very much bandwidth left on DisplayPort 1.4 to do that. So, you pretty much have to be in USB 2 mode, and your graphics card, the thing that you're using, has to support something called display stream compression. Technically, this is a DisplayPort 2 feature, and so BenQ could say that this monitor is DisplayPort 2. LG has
certainly done that. LG has a monitor that is actually DisplayPort 1.4 plus the optional display stream compression support. This monitor supports that as well. And LG calls it DisplayPort 2. It's not DisplayPort 2. It's DisplayPort 1.4 with the optional display stream compression. This monitor is DisplayPort 1.4 with the optional display stream compression. So, yay. And so, you can run a normal 4K monitor, or even two of these side by side. You're really pushing it at 120 Hz. 90 is a little safer, and it's going to depend on the cable and some other variables. Like, I don't I'm not going to tell you that's guaranteed. But, MST is pretty cool because you can take the DisplayPort on this monitor and use it as an output instead of an input. KVM
stuff is a little out the window. Although, you could use HDMI, I suppose. Bundled with this monitor, you know, it doesn't come with a DisplayPort cable. You'll have to get your own. But, you know, remember it does have HDMI and everything else. So, yeah. In general, wouldn't recommend MST in a monitor at all. But, some people like to be able to plug one cable into a laptop, but even in Thunderbolt 5 days, there's just it's not enough bandwidth when you're talking about really nice monitors like this. Even Thunderbolt 5 is anemic in 2026 when you've got beyond 4K and 5K and 6K displays that you want
to run at 100 hertz plus. Now, 4K 60 * 2, sure, that would be fine. But, 120 hertz is nice. You should use it. Oh, and for color calibration and color work like that, it's like, "Oh, it's a programming monitor." Programmers don't care about colors. It is actually surprisingly well calibrated out of the box. Uh you want to pick the sRGB profile in the OSD, however. Not bad. Everything here is pretty awesome. Uh using it with my System76 setup for the last little while, it has actually been surprisingly good. It has grown on me. I really, really like the matte finish on this.
Uh I've also been I mean, if you watch my other videos, I've also been using a lot of OLED monitors. I like the response time of OLED monitors, and I like how they can burn my retinas. But, the brightness on this thing at 100% is also really nice. Uh in a dark room, you don't want to run it at 100% brightness. It'll hurt your eyes. But, the brightness goes way, way down, and it still maintains clarity even at relatively low brightness. And being able to toggle between the different controls with the little programmer button on the front, so that you can move between, you know, if you're going to watch a movie or play a game and coding mode, is a real nice quality of life feature. And there are some quirks
and odd things. The charging thing that I mentioned and wake up, you can kind of overcome that with uh changes to the OSD. If you do use the DDCi thing, I've got Linux on both of these machines. BenQ doesn't ignore the DDCi commands from the inactive input. So, when the Mira is active, it'll still accept DDCi commands from the laptop. And when the laptop is active, it'll still accept DDCi commands from the desktop. This is problematic. So, uh maybe you want to turn that off. Other than that, I get why BenQ would advertise this as a programming monitor. If you have one of these, or you've experienced one of these, and you want to share your thoughts or comments or whatever, definitely engage below.
That's about all the thoughts that I have for this one, but I'm going to keep using it and I'm probably going to pick up a second one for use in the programming station. And as I use this over time, if I have updates, I'm going to post it on the Level One Tech forums because that's where we gather the knowledge. All right, I'm Wendell this Level One. If you have any questions or I miss anything, 3 by 2 is legit. I like that aspect ratio. I like it for productivity. I like it for a monitor that's designed to be on 8-plus hours a day, unlike OLED. I mean, you know, I don't know. I'm Wendell this Level One. If you have any questions or I miss anything, uh you can find me in the
Level One Tech forums. So, I'm signing off and I'll see you there.
