I do a great majority of my work from home, sat at a table, hunched over a laptop. As do a lot of the people reading this I would bet. We all know what steps we should take to alleviate any health issues, but we don’t always do them.
With this in mind, the lovely people at BenQ recently sent me one of their new monitors to review, and one with some rather special Eye Care features built-in.
There is a lot of talk about the issues surrounding Blue Light at the moment, but what is it? Blue light, which is part of the visible light spectrum, reaches deeper into the eye and its cumulative effect can cause damage to the retina. Furthermore, in certain wavelengths, blue light is implicated in the development of age-related macular degeneration. A search on Google for Blue Light demonstrates the amount of discussion around this subject.
The BenQ EW277HDR has been designed specifically to deal with these issues, but I won’t be rambling on about all of the technical details as that’s not my particular speciality. You can find out more about how it deals with these issues by downloading this information sheet or viewing this rather excellent video from Barbster360.
So what am I going to talk about?
Firstly, let me say that the BenQ EW277HDR is a gorgeous looking piece of kit with a lovely thin bezel making the viewing screen the star of the show. Compared to working on my Macbook Pro the 27 inches is obviously a massive improvement, and when using it to edit video there is oodles of space for all of the necessary palettes.
However there are problems with the way in which the monitor alters the colour temperature to match the ambient lighting. This is one of the features to help with eye strain, and it works perfectly. I let my son borrow the monitor for a week to see if his late night gaming sessions would be made any easier by the eye care features and he assures me that he now feels he can play longer and later than ever before – although I’m not too sure I should be entirely happy about that 😉
My point however is that whilst this feature is great at reducing eye strain, and has proved hugely beneficial to one of my writer friends, it is not particularly useful for working with videos and photography where colour precision is vital especially when correcting various video sources.
Another gripe I have is that the in-built speakers are not that great. Now many monitors don’t have particularly good audio output and headphones would obviously overcome this problem, but it’s definitely something that stuck with me.
Would I recommend the BenQ EW277HDR? Absolutely! For the home-worker who needs the reassurance of knowing that there most precious of organs are being taken care of it’s a no-brainer. But for those of us in the creative pursuits caution is advised, and there are some issues that would need to be addressed via the monitors various options.
If you would like to have your own BenQ EW277HDR Monitor then you can order direct from BenQ here, and if you use the code SWINFEW277HDR_freeshipping you’ll even get FREE SHIPPING!