How to Choose Monitors for Movie-Watching

When choosing the right monitor for watching movies, the most important characteristics are color performance, HDR capabilities, and viewing experience details for maximum enjoyment. The most cinematic monitors provide wide color gamuts for brilliant picture quality, high contrast ratios to preserve subtle details, and the latest HDR technology for vivid realism and natural presence. Using this guide to prioritize these critical picture quality elements along with smart features, movie enthusiasts can find the perfect monitor for unsurpassed home cinema entertainment.

Whether you’re playing a movie on Blu-ray, watching YouTube, or binge-streaming your Netflix series, videos utilize color and image details to convey ideas and emotions. The best monitors on the market employ wide color gamut technology to precisely deliver this vision. Measured by international color standards such as Rec. 709, sRGB, and DCI-P3, a display’s color gamut represents the total number of achievable colors. As a monitor’s color gamut gets wider, it can provide more subtle variations of distinct colors in order to accurately portray the original scenes on the home monitor screen, immersing viewers in what the audience was meant to see and feel.

Because cinematic colors of most movies are tuned quite differently from TV programming, it’s even more important for the monitor to offer a wide color gamut to achieve authentic experiences. In addition, a wide gamut allows displays to correctly replicate every scene throughout an entire movie, so that color inconsistencies don’t result in unbalanced performance, such as certain scenes looking brilliant while others distorted.

Measuring the luminance range between the darkest and brightest areas of a scene, the contrast ratio of a display makes a significant difference when selecting a monitor for watching movies. High contrast lets a display provide more perceptible gradations in subtle textures, preserve nuances and details in dark regions, and prevent washout in bright scenes.

A fundamental difference among all types of monitors is its panel structure, which determines its high contrast and viewing angle capabilities. Conventional monitors based on “twisted nematic” (TN) panels can provide only limited contrast and viewing angles, while “in-plane switching” (IPS) and “vertical alignment” (VA) can deliver better contrast ratios and viewing angles. VA panel monitors, especially, offer truer colors that do not distort when viewed from an off-center angle, as well as clearly superior distinction of subtly colorful details in textured or dark scenes for naturally realistic scenes with true depth.

High-performance VA panels are used in BenQ E Series monitors and are designed especially for video enjoyment, which offer additional features to maximize your multimedia entertainment. For example, the EW3270U delivers true 4K UHD resolution with 4 times the pixel density of Full HD 1080p. Combining 4K ultra resolution with its wide color gamut spanning 95% of DCI-P3 and stratospheric 3000:1 native contrast, EW3270U provides your senses with breathtaking video quality.

Furthermore, curved models are a great option to surround the viewer in an ideal curvature, filling your field of vision with spectacular visuals. Offering 35” of expansive space in a super widescreen 21:9 aspect ratio, EX3501R is the perfect choice to watch anamorphic 2.35 Cinemascope format movies without letterboxing .

Perhaps the most remarkable feature for watching movies is High Dynamic Range (HDR)technology. It enables the finest monitors to deliver the total range of colors and brightness levels that human eyes can perceive. HDR expands the display’s achievable color spectrum and enhances its range of brightness levels to much more closely resemble real life. For example, without HDR, a piece of white paper may exhibit the same brightness level as rays of sunlight, limited by the monitor’s maximum brightness. HDR technology dramatically boosts peak luminance, as well as providing extended “range” between subtle gradations among darker hues. This results in sharply realistic image details, piercing brightness without washout, and superb dark rendition to ensure every element of the original footage is preserved accurately.

Specifically developed to replicate the most authentic images, HDR monitors fully produce the entire bright-dark tone variation within a given scene to prevent overexposure and lost details while producing true, intense colors in dark areas as well as bright. Accurately replicating original colors as seen in real life by the naked eye, HDR monitors are designed to work seamlessly with the film industry’s wide gamut standards including Rec. 709, sRGB, and DCI-P3 to offer a replica of the original source content with perfect picture quality.

Complementing the picture quality attributes of color gamut, contrast, and HDR performance, BenQ’s monitors offer convenient equipment and features to maximize your enjoyment. In addition to the wide viewing angle capability of VA panels that lets you watch from different vantage points without distortion, today’s top entertainment monitors are equipped with versatile stands that tilt, swivel, and height-adjust vertically to enjoy movies in full comfort. BenQ video enjoyment monitors also offer impressive audio capabilities, including some with integrated speakers and all models featuring high-quality headphone jacks for immersive personal entertainment.

And for fast, hassle-free setup and optimization of best picture quality, make sure that the monitor is equipped with the latest inputs and connectivity, including multiple HDMI ports, DisplayPort, and USB Type-C to host a wide variety of playback devices ranging from the latest smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles and laptops, to Blu-ray and streaming boxes such as Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, and Fire TV. Of course, the latest protocols including DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, and HDCP 2.2 will ensure monitor compatibility with future devices and content materials.

BenQ video enjoyment monitors even feature the latest eye-care technology, including flicker-free performance, blue light reduction, and intelligent brightness modulation for ambient lighting and source content to protect your vision and eliminate fatigue for extended sessions of binge-watching movies.

For movie buffs and video aficionados, it’s critical to prioritize the monitor’s color and contrast performance as well as HDR capability. Selecting the best specifications for these picture quality criteria along with your preferred set of features will help you to find your dream movie monitor.