piXL 28″ LED 4K Monitor Review – Affordable 4K?

How Much Does it Cost?

As I said before, it’s available at a lot of smaller electronic stores, both on the high street and online store, eBay, etc. They all list for around £200, give or take a few quid. There’s some on Amazon right now for just £202, which is exceptional value for a 28-inch 4K panel.

Overview

This monitor isn’t perfect, but I think the price reflects that. However, what minor issues it does have were very easily navigated. Firstly, the stand is fine, but I do think it’s a little short and a bit stiff to adjust. However, since it has a VESA mount, I’d just simply use my own stand, or even put it on the wall mount I currently use. £25 on Amazon will get you a height-adjustable one that can be rotated, a worthy upgrade for any monitor.

The colour accuracy is a bit whacky out of the box too, but a simple calibration was all it took to get things looking a heck of a lot better. So basically a few adjustments in the settings and you’re good.

Calibration

I normally use Spyder5Elite to calibrate the monitor professionally for a review. I’ll test at stock settings, calibrate, test again and check the improvement. I didn’t do that today though. This is NOT a professional class monitor, and realistically it’s unlikely to ever have a customer calibrate it in this way. I put the monitor settings to Gamma 1.8, I dropped the brightness a little, put it in Movie Mode, and set the colour temperature to Warm. That’s it. The improvements were significant too, giving us a near perfect tone response, a greatly improved grey ramp, and improved the colour accuracy too. Delta E on the cyan was still a bit high, but to the eye, the monitor looked absolutely fine.

Performance

With a 5ms response time, the monitor is great for gaming. It’s not an eSports monster 144hz panel or anything like that, but that’s fine. I play Elder Scrolls Online, and a few single player adventure games, and the monitor looks great running all of them. I even played some Forza Horizon at 4K60 and everything looked silky smooth, so can’t complain there.

Obviously, the increased resolution is great for productivity too. You can view a few windows side by side and still clearly read smaller details. For writing reviews, I find that really handy.

Should I Buy One?

There’s no shortage of great monitors for around £200. However, getting a 4K panel, four display inputs, good response times and a good size 28-inch panel really limits your options to a handful. The piXL is extremely competitive, and a great way to get into the 4K market at home or at the office.

Update: piXL has seen my review, and will be adjusting the default settings accordingly. So now it’ll have great colours right out of the box, how great is that!