Feedback on Mac Studio M2 & BenQ Display

[kitv52694284]

With the increasing usage of AI in Photoshop, Lightroom Classic & Topaz Photo AI, my aging 2017 iMac 27 is showing its age. I am currently looking at a Mac Studio M2 & a BenQ SW272Q as a replacement. The Mac Studio can be quite expensive with the memory & storage that I would like. But I can keep the price within reason with the use of external SSD drives.

As for the BenQ display.... although it only has 2K resolution, my primary consideration is color accuracy. If I understand correctly, The BenQ SW227Q shares the same features as its 4K big brother (the SW272U), but minus the heftier price tag.

I would appreciate the thoughts of those who have had experience with either the Mac Studio M2 or the BenQ SW272Q display in your photo processing work. Thank you kindly.

[Jao vdL]

I have a similar SW style BenQ and it is very good. It has exemplary color accuracy. It can be calibrated very well with most calibrators using the custom software they provide and stores the calibration in the monitor which is much better for avoiding color banding etc. I would guess this one is similar. Also, it looks just fine at QHD resolution on Mac OS. Text is not as crisp as you would get on a 4K monitor and Mac OS definitely is not as good for displaying text on low resolution displays as windows due to the lack of sub pixel antialiasing on Mac OS but images are super crisp and text is more than acceptable.

[Conrad_C]

Although I haven’t used either, there are some objective facts that can be said.

Mac mini M2: The base model is a decently specced desktop for Lightroom Classic with a good number of CPU and GPU cores. It already comes with 32GB Unified Memory (the amount I use every day), so there is not much to upgrade except maybe internal storage. It would be reasonable to get the next higher level of Unified Memory if your files are very large or you want to be more prepared for higher system requirements in the future. Most Lightroom Classic users will not need to do the expensive upgrade to the M2 Ultra processor, but if you do pay for the Ultra:

• The doubled CPU cores can speed up bulk preview generation and general operation. 
• The doubled GPU cores can speed up all GPU-accelerated features (Develop, export, AI features…). AI Denoise tends to scale with the number of GPU cores, so the M2 Ultra should run Denoise twice as fast as on the M2 Max. 

Those are Lightroom Classic benefits, and as you can see most of the benefits are for those doing bulk processing every day. The Ultra probably won’t seem much faster in other apps unless they make heavy use of multiple cores and GPU, such as video editing.

The BenQ SW272Q is a safe choice, it has a reputation for high quality color. Some say that certain specs such as uniformity are not quite as good as the top level players like Eizo, but the BenQ is a lot cheaper. I agree with the priorities for photo editing: Color accuracy, wide gamut, and hardware calibration are all more important than having 4K or 5K pixels. In other words, better pixels are more important than more pixels.