Monoprice UHD Matte 28-inch Monitor Review

OSD Setup & Calibration

The OSD menu is very small, as if it were designed for a lower-resolution screen. If you wear bifocals like me, you'll have to get up close to read the fine print. It is however, quite complete with lots of image adjustments and a few other unexpected features. Let's take the tour.

OSD Tour

To manually change input sources on the UHD Matte, visit the Input Source sub-menu. If there is only one signal, the display will automatically lock on so you won't be coming here often. At the bottom of every OSD screen is input info for all four PIP/PBP channels. More on that below.

The backlight has a relatively small range of 82 to 246cd/m². With a hundred possible steps, you'll have fine control over light output. The Contrast default setting is 75 and there it should stay to prevent clipping of detail and gamma inaccuracies.

The Color Setting menu has five gamma presets (1.8-2.6), four picture modes, three color temp options plus User and hue/saturation adjustments. The latter controls affect all colors simultaneously so use them carefully. We left them alone during our calibration.

The USER option opens up the RGB sliders, which happily start at center range. Thanks to this we were able to increase contrast during calibration. One word of warning: exiting the RGB screen sets the UHD Matte to its Photo picture mode, which is quite inaccurate. Remember to change it back to Standard after making your adjustments.

You don't often find uniformity compensation in a monitor this inexpensive, but Monoprice has included it (and we'll be testing it). The Response Time adjustment has three levels of which High produces the best moving image quality with no ghosting and fast panel response. The first option, Bypass, grays out the entire menu. We thought it might be a way to reduce input lag but our tests showed no difference.

Aspect Ratio options include Wide Screen, which stretches all signals to fill the screen, 4:3 to prevent distorting images of that shape, and 1:1, which maps each pixel directly. Lower-res images are windowed in that mode.

In the Audio menu you can select a signal source, adjust the volume or mute the sound entirely.

Ultra HD monitors are ideal for PIP and PBP. The UHD Matte can display four sources simultaneously and allows a mix of both analog and digital signals. If you choose the PIP mode, the window can be sized small, medium or large and positioned in any corner of the screen. The info at the bottom monitors the status of each input.

OSD options include four languages, position, transparency, timeout and rotation. Reset will return all options to their factory defaults.

Calibration

The only picture mode that's reasonably accurate out of the box is Standard, which happens to be the default. The UHD Matte provides acceptable performance without calibration but a few tweaks to the RGB sliders will increase contrast and improve accuracy for both color and grayscale. The gamma options are right on target and the tracking is some of the best we've seen. Please try our recommended settings to optimize your Monoprice UHD Matte.