John, the BenQ SW2700PT warranty is 3 years. That's 1 year shy of the 4 year warranty on my NEC PA302W's. Realistically I don't expect it to be much of an issue with an LED display. Most of them either should have trouble quickly if they're going to have major trouble at all, or else last long enough that I'd be itching to upgrade them before they die.
With the old CCFL-based NEC displays, my rule of thumb was to run them for at least 10,000 - 12,000 hours of operating time before I started paying much attention to how they were holding up. One old NEC 2690 lasted over 13,000 hours without issue before I got tired of waiting for it to die and upgraded it to a PA302W. One old 3090 lastest over 14,000 hours before the screen started to delaminate; it got upgraded with another PA302W. I expect the various new high-spec LED based displays should be stable for longer than that... as long as the rest of the device electronics hold up, I think it's reasonable to hope for double the life span.
The BenQ models (and some of the other similar displays from LG, Asus and whomever) are so much cheaper that they must be incurring cost savings by cutting something somewhere. Whether that's lesser QC standards that will lead to more sample variation, or loss of longevity, is hard to say. It offends me to buy serious tools that aren't made to last. But having said that, if a BenQ model costs say half the price of a NEC for roughly comparable display quality, you could replace them twice as often and break even purely on $.
I'll probably always run some NEC displays because I really trust them and I'm not in any rush to dump a super dependable tool. But I run several colour critical displays and might be able to depend on these new BenQ's enough to add them into the mix. When I bought my latest pair of PA302W's I really would have preferred to go with 4K at that point... but the cost of the NEC's was a bit prohibitive for my budget, so I held off. So I'm eager to check out the BenQ SW320 and see if it will fill that slot.
