Last year's Asus PA246Q monitor earned our Editors' Choice award for its affordable price, robust feature set, and excellent IPS color reproduction, among other things. Its successor, the Asus PA248Q, is also an affordable 24-inch IPS monitor, and it too offers a generous feature set and delivers deep, rich colors. Its grayscale performance is good but not great, and like the earlier model, it does not support auto-rotation when the panel's orientation changes from landscape to portrait. That said, the PA248Q is a solid choice for anyone seeking a full-featured IPS monitor with a budget-friendly price.

There are a few major differences between the newer PA248Q and its earlier sibling, the PA246Q; the PA248Q uses an e-IPS panel while the PA246Q uses a P-IPS panel. Panels using e-IPS technology are cheaper to manufacture than P-IPS panels, and while their viewing angle performance is superior to TN panels, it isn't quite as good as P-IPS viewing angles. Additionally, the PA248Q uses LED backlighting while the older Asus PA246Q uses CCFL backlighting. Lastly, the Asus PA246Q is a wide gamut display while the PA248Q is a standard (72-percent) gamut display.

Design and Features
The PA248Q's 1,920-by-1,600 panel has a 16:10 aspect ratio and a non-reflective matte anti-glare coating. At 2.3-inches thick it is certainly thinner than the PA246Q but not nearly as thin as other LED backlit monitors I've reviewed, such as the 1-inch LG IPS236V. The cabinet sports a basic matte black finish and is supported by a telescoping mounting arm with a built-in tilt and pivot hinge. The arm has a 4-inch height adjustment and a 25-degree tilt range, and it allows you to pivot the panel 90-degrees to view content in portrait mode. However, you'll have to change the image orientation in the graphics control panel as the monitor does not have an auto-rotation feature like the more expensive NEC Multisync PA301Wdoes. A mechanism in the base lets you swivel the cabinet for optimal viewing angles.

As with the Asus PA246Q, the PA248Q has ruler-like markings etched into its bezels that are nothing more than a cosmetic effect. A ProArt logo is positioned on the left side of the upper bezel and the Asus badge is centered on the lower bezel. The right bezel holds seven buttons, including menu, input select, preset select, two programmable hot keys (designated for contrast and brightness by default), a power switch, and a quick Fit button that contains various grid patterns and paper sizes that allow you to preview a page layout and edit photos in real size. This button is also used to navigate the OSD menus.

Splendid Technology is Asus-speak for preset picture settings. It includes Standard, Theater, sRGB, and Scenery presets as well as two User customizable modes. The Color menu offers brightness, contrast, saturation, hue, and color temperature settings. It also has two gamma settings (1.8 and 2.2) and an advanced submenu with six-color (RGBCMY) hue, saturation, and gain settings. Image settings include sharpness, position, focus, and aspect ratio.

I/O ports are abundant. The rear of the cabinet holds DisplayPort, HDMI, VGA, and DVI video inputs as well as an earphone jack and an upstream USB port. The left side contains four USB 3.0 ports, which is an improvement over the Asus PA246Q's two USB 2.0 ports. However, the PA248Q lacks the card reader found on the earlier model.

Performance
The PA248Q delivers the kind of color quality that you'd expect from an IPS panel. Swatches from the DisplayMate Color Scales test showed good saturation and uniformity across the scale. Skin tones looked natural and the LED backlighting provided a bright picture with solid blacks.

Grayscale performance was good but not stellar. Swatches from the DisplayMate 64-Step Grayscale test transitioned evenly from dark to light but the two darkest swatches were clipped; that is, they were both a tad too dark. The same hiccup occurred at the light end of the scale.

The IPS panel provides wide viewing angles with very little loss of color fidelity when viewed from an extreme side angle. Top and bottom angles are also quite good, which is important when rotating the panel to portrait mode. The PA248Q had no trouble displaying small text on the Scaled Fonts portion of my test.

The PA248Q required 30-watts of power during my testing while running in Standard picture mode, which is significantly less than the 73 watts used by the Asus PA246Q and right in line with other similarly sized IPS monitors such as the LG IPS235V (34 watts) and the NEC Multisync EA232WMi (34 watts).

With the Asus PA248Q you get rich, robust IPS color quality, four video inputs (three of which are digital), four USB 3.0 ports, and an ergonomic stand with multiple adjustment options. It also provides myriad picture settings and nice wide viewing angles. Its grayscale performance is better than that of most TN panels but it can't match the performance of our reigning Editors' Choice, the NEC Multisync EA232WMi. Still, for $340, this is a solid deal.

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