As a secondary monitor next to the ridiculous Apple Studio Display XDR I’m using as my main monitor, my six year old BenQ PD2720U 4K is… fine. Since I only stare at it maybe ten percent of the time that I spend at my desk, I can overlook the handful of dead pixels, as well as the burn-in and yellowing at the edges of the display. I can even overlook the fact that the display speakers gave up on me at some point, since I have a pair of Audioengine A2+ speakers on my desk as well. All of these downsides were harder to overlook before I got the Studio Display XDR, since the PD2720U was still my primary monitor at that point.
Before the yellowing and the dead pixels, I was quite happy with the BenQ PD2720U 4K. When I bought it six years ago, it was an affordable 27” monitor with 4K resolution that you can connect to your Mac with a Thunderbolt cable. That checked all of my boxes. I could mostly ignore the bulky plastic casing, the 60Hz refresh rate, and the not-great 350 nits brightness.
Of course, all of those flaws makes it look twenty years old when it’s next to the Apple Studio Display XDR on my desk, but that’s not a fair comparison. If you keep its price and release year in mind, the BenQ D2720U 4K is a pretty good display. Based on the specs, the more recent Mac focused BenQ displays (like the BenQ MA270S) seem like good alternatives for the pricier Apple displays as well, although when I get around to replacing mine with a different secondary monitor, I’ll probably opt for the non-XDR Apple Studio Display instead.
