Asus ProArt PA32QCV

I’ll cut to the chase: it’s a nice resolution upgrade from an Apple or LG 5k display. But that’s about it – in every other visual respect (brightness, contrast, etc) it’s basically the same. Though the built-in KVM is a nice addition.

Resolution

The extra resolution is significant – it is 38% more pixels – and welcome, but it’s not revolutionary. It feels like what should have just been the natural progression and not a big deal – in the same way we started with 9″ sub-VGA displays and have over decades worked our way up to bigger and higher-resolution ones.

And in that vein, the prospect of downgrading back to a 5k display is immediately deeply unappealing (pay attention, Apple 😠). The notion of going down to a mere 4k display is absurd (tempting as bright[er] OLEDs are¹).

Dimness (née Brightness)

Even though it’s supposedly brighter than the LG UltraFine 5K it’s replacing for me, it doesn’t really seem it. I had the LG set at 50% brightness, but the equivalent brightness requires ~80% on the Asus. Which doesn’t entirely make sense – yes, the LG was rated at 500 vs the Asus’s 400 (SDR), but that difference should mean the Asus is set to 62.5% in order to match, not 80%. I wonder now if the LG UltraFine 5k significantly out-performed its 500-nit rating in practice?

Matte-ugly

I do not like the matte finish. Mildly, but clearly. Compared to the LG UltraFine 5K that I was previously using, the PA32QCV has visible ‘shimmer’ or ‘sparkle’ – basically fine luminance noise that changes as your viewing position changes (even just slightly). It makes the screen look a bit dirty, too – contrast is lower than it should be, and text just doesn’t have quite the same clarity it does on other displays (like Apple’s, or the LG UltraFine 5k).

I’m not yet decided if it’s a deal-breaker… there’s no good glossy 6k display options currently. I’m hoping that I’ll just get used to it. But there’s no mistaking that the screen’s finish is notably worse than its predecessors and Apple contemporaries. Especially for bright content (folks using Dark Mode might not be affected so much).

VESA mounting

I was perplexed when I first opened the box, and found what looked like a proprietary mounting system, with only a stand included, not a VESA mount adapter. The box contains basically no instructions or explanation of anything, and even the manual – dug up through manualslib online because Asus’s website contains only broken links to it (though I later noticed that B&H host it too) – has no real information on how to VESA mount the display, other than cryptically stating that you need a “VESA Wall Mount Adapter (sold separately)”.

Thankfully, Itchy_Pin9813 on Reddit had already figured it out – the four screws that look like they might be structural, are actually just weird placeholders.

You just remove them and then screw in any standard 100⨉100 VESA mount.

However, be aware that the mounting point is recessed significantly. Though the plate itself fit in the recessed area just fine (as shown above), I was only barely able to get my mount plate attached to the arm itself, without the arm hitting the surrounding casing. I did notice that you can buy adapters specifically designed for this design flaw.

BSOD

When the display detects no input video signal, it displays a hideously-coloured bright blue screen, reminiscent of Window’s Blue Screen of Death.

Which would be fine – generally you won’t see that, unless something’s genuinely gone wrong with your cables or computer – except that it sometimes flashes into this mode momentarily when your Mac is waking the display back up. It’s jarring and ugly.

This isn’t the first display to have this design flaw, but I just cannot fathom how, after decades of experience in displays all around us in the real world, someone somewhere inside Asus still thought it’d be a good idea to do this instead of just displaying a black screen (optionally with calm grey “No Input Signal” text on it).

Broken USB port?

I’m still trying to figure out if it’s so-called “user error” (or more accurately lack-of-any-product-documentation error on Asus’s part), but one of the USB ports appears to be completely dead. Nothing plugged into it registers – neither power is provided to the device nor does it show up in the USB device tree on any connected computers.

Frankly for my purposes even if it is a dead port I couldn’t be bothered dealing with returns etc. But buyers beware – there may be a quality control problem here (dead USB ports were something I encountered tales of frequently in my research on displays, though I don’t specifically recall if they were associated with this Asus ProArt 6K).

Subtler effects

It might take more time to appreciate some of the more subtle differences, vs the LG UltraFine 5K at least.

HDR Mode

The ability to use HDR mode – meaning I can set my ‘regular’ GUI brightness to what’s comfortable without [artificially] limiting the brightness of imagery – might reveal itself as kind of a big deal, with further use, but since the additional brightness is pretty minor (in a daylight-lit room, at least) I don’t know yet.

Colour depth

The Asus has 10-bit colour while the LG only supports 8-bit colour (yes, the LG has FRC, but that’s far from true 10-bit colour support). So perhaps as I use it more – particularly as I edit more photos on my new Asus display – I’ll stumble onto cases where that clearly matters. But this also might be something where only a side-by-side comparison would really reveal it (I can’t say I have any complaints about banding or other 8-bit issues on the LG – it looks good).

Colour accuracy

I also haven’t actually checked the colour accuracy yet. Asus do include a basic printed calibration report in the box, from their factory calibration, which is nice and hopefully not just performative. I do have a colour metre (an old ColorMunki), but going through the process is frankly frustrating and tedious, and I’m rarely actually happy with the results (more accurate is not the same as better looking). I can at least say that the colour looks fine (once I dialled in better settings than the defaults – see below) and similar-enough to the other displays in my life that I have no complaints.

Configuration recommendations

• In macOS Settings:
  • Enable “High Dynamic Range” for the display (in the “Displays” pane). This does two things:
    • It enables macOS brightness control – the brightness slider appears in System Settings, and the keyboard shortcuts to control brightness will then work.
      
      Note that, conversely, it basically prevents you adjusting the display’s brightness from the display’s own controls (you become limited to “MAX” and 250).
    • It allows HDR content to use the full luminance range of the display irrespective of the brightness setting. i.e. you can adjust the “regular” brightness of the GUI independent of the HDR image & video brightness. Note, however, that there doesn’t seem to be a way to control the brightness of HDR content.
      
      Keep in mind, though, that the PA32QCV is not a bright display. It’s rated to up to 600 nits, possibly only for small patches or brief time periods, and while some reviewers measure it a little higher than that – kudos to Asus for erring on the conservative side in their marketing – it’s nothing like a “true” HDR display (i.e. MicroLED and high-end MiniLED displays) such as Apple’s MacBook Pro displays, Apple’s Pro Display XDR, or the Asus ProArt 8K.
• In the display’s settings:
  • Settings > Dynamic Dimming should be OFF. When it’s on the display adjusts the brightness over time in response to the image shown, but very slowly such that you can see it ramping up or down lazily after an average brightness change. It’s just horrible for video creation since it’s seriously messing with your luminance and animation. And I’m not even sure it’s a good idea when watching video, since the brightness transitions are noticeable and distracting.
    
    If you never view animated content, then I suppose leaving it on could be beneficial since its purpose is ostensibly to give you greater static range – when the screen overall is dim, such as editing a dark photo, it will reduce the backlight in order to darken the blacks, while conversely in a bright image it’ll boost the backlight to give you maximum brightness (but at the expense of washing out the blacks completely).
  • Palette > Brightness must be set to “MAX” when macOS is using HDR mode, otherwise you’ll be limited to 250 nits even for HDR content! If macOS is not set to HDR mode then it sets the brightness in nits, from 0 to 400.
    
    It’s pleasing to see a scale that’s in real units, not just some arbitrary scale like 0 to 100%. Or at least, I’m assuming that’s the case – that the scale goes to 400, and otherwise odd, arbitrary number, and that the display’s nominal peak [SDR] brightness is 400 seems like an unlikely coincidence.
  • Palette > Black Level > Signal should be left at its default, 50. Changing this basically changes the luminance curve of the display – lowering it pulls down the brightness, crushing the shadows in particular, while raising it increases the brightness, washing out the shadows. It has no apparent effect on actual black levels (nor, surprisingly, does its peer “Backlight” setting, which seems strange because surely that’s the point of it?).
  • If you’re creating HDR content, in the display’s settings, set Preset > HDR to “PQ Clip”.
    
    If you’re viewing HDR content, use “PQ Optimized”.
    
    Yes, this might be something you have to change frequently, because there’s no happy medium. 😔
    
    Under the default setting, “PQ Optimized”, the display futzes with the image to make the display’s brightness limit less noticeable – it “smoothes” out the approach to the maximum brightness by making the too-bright parts darker (to prevent clipping) and the nearly-too-bright parts brighter. This provides a pleasing but highly inaccurate effect – you don’t see stark clipping as easily, and the image overall looks bright, but you’re seriously changing the localised luminance of the image. If you edit a photo or video this way and then put it on another display, you may be dismayed to find it looks completely different, luminance- and contrast-wise.
    
    This is a consequence, I infer, of how macOS renders HDR content. In SDR mode, macOS just directly maps the input image’s dynamic range to the display’s – 100% in the image goes to the display as 100%. But in HDR mode it seems like it’s basically ignoring your displays capabilities and perhaps working in absolute brightness. So if the input image says it is 2,000 nits, macOS emits pixels with that nominal brightness. Which may be way beyond what the display can handle, so they just get clipped to its max brightness (or artificially adjusted by the display).
    
    And (for completeness) the “PQ Basic” setting is, I think, doing just the darkening part of “PQ Optimized”, which in a nutshell means it looks like “PQ Optimized” but dimmer overall. I’m not sure what use that is.
  • Settings > PowerSaving can be set to “Deep Level” (the default, for “Energy Saver” mode) iff you have macOS set to HDR mode. Otherwise, it limits the maximum brightness severely.
    
    Of course, I’m not yet sure what “Deep Level” does in HDR mode – possibly nothing. But I’m hoping it just means the display uses less power when not actually active.

1. This ties into my choice to get this 6k display, here and now. I agonised over the decision for a long time. I was pretty much resigned to just paying some obscene amount of money for the Apple Pro Display XDR 2 – on the assumption that it’d be a nice modest upgrade with more backlight zones and a brightness boost, which turned out to be correct but alas not the whole story – but once Apple publicised that they were killing the XDR entirely, it left me in the doldrums.
   
   I considered many options – including buying no-name-brand ones from China – but ultimately whittled it down to two possibilities: the Asus ProArt 8K, or the 6K. The Asus ProArt 8K is Apple-level expensive, and at 32″ its pixel density is far too high to actually reap noticeable benefit from the extra pixels over the 6K, but it otherwise checks the boxes. I spent a long time trying to convince myself it wasn’t insane to spend $9,000 on a display – keeping in mind that the original Apple Cinema Display was $4k at time of release in 1999, which is nearly $8k in 2026 dollars, and the Sony Trinitron displays were thousands of dollars too, in the 1990s… I also tried to reason that a display should last basically forever, and remain useful for decades, so what’s $9k over the rest of my life? 😅
   
   But in the end I thought… why? Even that $9k 8K display isn’t the best at everything. It’s not the brightest, it doesn’t have the biggest colour gamut, it doesn’t have the best contrast ratio – it’s not even the prettiest… if I’m going to spend eye-watering amounts of money, I want to at least feel like it’s worth it.
   
   So, I went with the cheapest option instead, on the assumption that I’ll revisit my display situation in a few more years. ↩︎