Talking/writing about monitors is a bit like writing about wine; useful and required, but ultimately insufficient.
We are highly biased here in that we sell Eizo monitors and do not sell benQ or other brands of monitors. But that’s because of our experience with Eizo; they do not require or even request any form of exclusivity from us.
I’ve been working in this industry for 12 years, and that spans a lot of Eizo sales. In all that time I cannot think of a single person to whom we sold an Eizo that was disappointed. They come out of the box well calibrated, the modern ones calibrate automatically and autonomously overnight (they will even turn themselves on and off to do so), and they stay in calibration for many many years. They have a five year warranty that covers the calibration itself (with most monitors if the calibration starts to stray they won’t consider that a warranty issue; they only consider things like “won’t turn on” to be warranty related).
It’s my impression that most monitor companies are simply in the game of chasing specific specs they think people shop based on, like percent coverage of a specific color space. That may or may not correspond to a great monitor, because a lot of important facets of a “great monitor” are not easily defined in consumer-oriented specs: things like the propensity to create false posterization or banding, the neutrality or color consistency of single-color gradients (think skies or product sweeps) and the perceived clarity of high saturation detail in deep shadows (think deep browns on a tree bark in the shadow). The engineers at Eizo are in the business of making the best possible monitor, and must be because they sell a ton of monitors to Doctors and medical diagnosticians for viewing important imagery like XRays and other scans. As a result of making the best possible monitor they also happen to hit all those consumer-oriented specs.
So anyway, my advice on monitors is always the same: you can do a ton of research and comparisons and try to figure out if some other brand will be 90% as good at some less-than-90% price, and if that is a good ROI for you, given that the Eizo will almost surely outlast the other in your use. Or, if you have the budget, you buy the Eizo, and don’t have to think about monitors again for a very long time.
By the way, and acknowledgeding this biases us, we (DT) are still able to sell and ship Eizos during the lockdown, and when things reopen we have demo models at our offices in NYC and LA, attached to Mac Pros in case you want to bring some of your images in and compare to a monitor you bring in or against your laptop.
