BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ review: A massive but marvellous OLED monster

Before I begin to examine BenQ’s Mobiuz EX480UZ, I need to say something about size. This thing is huge. And heavy. With the base, we are talking about 700 x 1068.5 x 267.6mm and 19.3kg. Even the tips of the stand are 680mm from each other. Manhandling it into place is no easy task single-handedly and you need to consider where you are going to position it. Realistically, you need to be sitting at least 1.5m away for it to be usable; any closer and the edges of the display are outside your field of vision.

Being an OLED panel the EX480UZ delivers contrast and response times that competing IPS and VA panels can only dream about, but it also uses an automatic and always-on brightness adjustment system to minimise OLED burn-in. A monitor with a mind of its own isn’t to everyone’s taste, although it has never bothered me.

The real elephant in the room, however, is the price. £1,500 is a lot for a monitor no matter how big and well-specified. If you can live without monitor levels of connectivity a good 48in OLED TV like the Philips 807 may be worth considering because it will save you a few hundred quid.

BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ review: What do you get for your money?

The EX480UZ is built around a 48in 3,840 x 2,160 92dpi LG-made OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, basic HDR10 decoding and 0.1ms G2G response time. It also boasts AMD FreeSync Premium and a handful of gaming features such as Light Tuner, which changes the balance between light and shadow, and Black Equalizer, which brings up more visible detail in excessively dark scenarios.

Whether or not you consider the EX480UZ’s 120Hz high enough for serious gaming depends on what games you play and how powerful your GPU is, but I suspect a lot of these things will be used in tandem with a PS5 or Xbox Series X, which means 120Hz is sufficient.

Physically the big BenQ certainly looks and feels like your money’s worth. In fact, it more resembles a high-end telly than a PC monitor. The back is all silver-finished stiff plastic with none of the rough edges or bare metal around the I/O ports that you often see.

The EX480UZ can nearly be described as frameless thanks to the slender 8mm bezels on three of the four sides. The chin below the display adds another 40mm to proceedings but given that it hides a genuine soundbar with pretty big speakers tucked inside it’s easy to overlook.

However, the size and weight limit the amount of adjustability you get. Fitted to the stand you are limited to changing the tilt angle between +2 and -15° and that’s it. There’s no height, rotation, swivel or pivot adjustment whatsoever. Granted you can fit it to a 200 x 200mm VESA mount, BenQ supplies a set of long extension bolts to help with this, but you will still need a seriously robust mounting arm and a very sturdy desk or wall to fix it to.

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BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ review: What type of connections does it have?

In deference to the size and weight of the EX480UZ, all the connections are on the side, as I feel they should be on all monitors. Thanks to a pretty solid range of I/O ports this is where the EX480UZ most effectively answers the question “Why not just buy a 48in OLED TV?”

On the right is the power socket while on the left you’ll find 3.5mm and Mini-TOSLINK S/PDIF audio jacks, two HDMI 2.1 and one DisplayPort 1.4 video inputs, a Type-C port that supports DP Alt Mode and 90W PD charging, an upstream Type-B USB port and two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 downstream ports.

If I was being picky I’d ask why there aren’t 4 Type-A ports when there is clearly enough room. At least the USB hub is smart enough to swap the KVM connections in accordance with the input selection so using the same keyboard and mouse with whatever is connected to the Type-B and Type-C ports is very straightforward.

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BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ review: How good is the image quality?

This big BenQ certainly doesn’t lack colour with 99.7% of the sRGB gamut available from a volume of 137.2%. Coverage of the DCI-P3 and AdobeRGB gamuts was 94.6% and 84.1% respectively which is also good. This being an OLED panel, the black level is effectively zero, which results in an infinite contrast ratio while the out-of-the-box gamma was a respectable 2.24.

BenQ quotes maximum peak brightness as 450cd/m² but you’ll only see that in HDRi mode (more on that below). In SDR the brightness peaked at 359cd/m², which is a decent enough figure but the full-screen average was a rather lower 135cd/m² – this would be disastrous on an IPS panel but is par for the course for any OLED with always-on burn-in reduction tech. Running my colorimeter over the panel in a 5 x 5 grid, the results did show some brightness variation towards the edges but not enough to be noticeable to the eye.

According to the specification sheet the EX480UZ has a Delta E colour variance of less than 2 which matches my testing. Against the sRGB profile, I recorded a Delta E of 1.39 while against the Display P3 profile, it came out at 1.46. Both those numbers are good for a monitor designed primarily for media consumption rather than creation. Incidentally, sRGB and Display P3 are the only standard colour profiles in the menu, the others being Game HDRi, Cinema HDRi, HDR, M-Book, Racing Game, RPG and Custom.

The EX480UZ’s party piece is HDRi, a proprietary BenQ system that presents content in adaptive ersatz HDR by adjusting the brightness and colour temperature without having to toggle HDR in Windows. The system is driven by an automatic brightness control called Brightness Intelligence Plus or BI+ which can occasionally lead to excessive dimming on the Windows desktop but can be disabled if needed.

This is the first time I’ve encountered HDRi on an OLED panel (like most HDR emulation systems I find it to be of marginal value on IPS displays) and I have to admit to being rather impressed. You can engage HDRi with just a push of a button – on either the remote or on the front of the monitor – to instantly see the difference even with Windows left in SDR mode.

Turn HDRi on while playing Halo Infinite and suddenly the landscape of Halo Installation 07 becomes a verdant, sumptuously coloured environment rather than a rather over-bright and drab affair. Flipping HDRi on and off while watching Blade Runner 2049 was similarly impressive, with the colour suddenly looking as they would on a decent OLED TV.

There are actually three HDR settings in the monitor. Basic HDR adds a slight yellow hue to proceedings but both Game HDRi and Cinema HDRi remove that by presenting a more colour-neutral picture with Game also boosting the visual daylight temperature to make colours that little bit more vivid.

No matter what’s on the screen, HDRi can be engaged to make it resemble a good-quality HDR picture (despite the lack of official HDR certification) with deeply saturated colours backed by OLED-level contrast, but the perk is that it’s all being done monitor-side and can be turned on or off with a touch of a button. The only piece of the HDR puzzle you’re missing here is retina-searing brightness, but given how close you’re going to be sitting to this monitor it’s not a deal breaker.

As you would expect from an OLED monitor, the EX480UZ handles motion well with very little motion blur or ghosting in evidence. Although it’s only AMD FreeSync Premium certified it showed up as G-Sync compatible in the Nvidia CP when hooked up to my RTX3060 GPU; screen tearing was noticeable only by its absence so it clearly works with Nvidia as well as AMD kit.

If you plan on spending serious time in front of the EX480UZ working rather than playing it’s good to know that it carries TÜV Rheinland certificates for low blue light emissions and for being flicker-free.

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BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ review: Are there any other features I should know about?

The 2.1 speaker system inside the EX480UZ is very good. It consists of two 5W full-range drivers and a 10W woofer which combine to deliver 80.7dB(A). That’s enough volume to fill even a large room and the audio quality matches the volume with plenty of tight, thumping bass, good detail levels and ample space and separation, the last helped by the fact that the two main drivers are over 1m apart.

Apparently, the speaker system and the various sound profiles have been developed by BenQ’s treVolo audio team using something called psychoacoustics, which sounds to me like someone’s been reading too much Isaac Azimov. Either way, the end results are very mellifluous.

At this point in a monitor review, I usually start bemoaning the layout of the OSD and the method of navigation around it, but not here. To start with, the menu system is remarkably compact and well-organised compared with some gaming monitors. Secondly, the joystick on the back of the display is very easy to use: just wiggle to move and push to select.

Thirdly, BenQ bundles an IR remote that lets you turn the monitor on and off, adjust the volume, swap between audio, gaming and colour profiles, change the input, swap between HDRi profiles, open the PIP/PBP menu and access the main menu. The remote means you never have to resort to laying hands on the monitor itself and I’m all for that because given the size of the thing you’ll probably be sitting more than an arm’s length away.

The back of the EX480UZ is home to four LED light strips but these are frankly a bit pointless because the thing is so big you can’t really see the glow they give off unless the room you are in is almost completely dark.

BenQ Mobiuz EX480UZ review: Should I buy it?

If you’ve got the space and want a gaming monitor that can double as a massive TV then this beast of a display will certainly fit the bill. The picture quality is good, the sound system is most impressive and it’s very easy to use thanks to the bundled remote. Then there’s HDRi, which brings many of the benefits of HDR with minimal fuss.