Asus BE24EQK review: A barebones remote working solution

The Asus BE24EQK was created to take advantage of a unique situation. It launched in May 2020 at the peak of the webcam shortages, when office workers across the globe were getting to grips with taking meetings remotely and desperately hunting for a cheap way to be seen and heard over Zoom.

The furore has died down since May 2020, but there’s still plenty to be said for a monitor with a built-in webcam. Remote working is going nowhere and the BE24EQK manages to kill two birds with one stone at a lower price than many of the high-end webcams we’ve tested.

The trouble is, in order to keep the price as low as it has, Asus has had to make some aggressive compromises. The BE24EQK is certainly the cheapest 1080p monitor with a built-in webcam we’ve ever seen, but it’s far from the best.

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Asus BE24EQK review: What do you get for the money?

At £200 you’d be mad to expect much from the BE24EQK. It has a 24in IPS panel with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, a response time of 5ms and a max refresh rate of 60Hz. You won’t find adaptive sync support or HDR certification here.

The panel is mounted on a stand that tilts 20 degrees backwards with no height adjustment, pivot or swivel to speak of. That said, the BE24EQK does support VESA mounting, so you could always remove the basic stand and stick the panel on a more flexible arm mount.

On the rear, you’ll find a single HDMI 1.4 port, a single DisplayPort (1.2) and a single VGA port, plus a 3.5mm jack and a USB-B port. The latter enables use of the top-mounted 1080p 2MP webcam. This webcam can spin 315 degrees so you can film your partner pulling faces mid-meeting, and it can tilt ten degrees upwards and downwards to keep you in the frame. It also has a physical privacy shutter.

The BE24EQK has a built-in microphone, too, which means this monitor is the complete Zoom meeting package. Thankfully, Asus includes HDMI, DisplayPort and USB-B cables in the box.

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Asus BE24EQK review: What do we like about it?

Price aside, the best thing about the BE24EQK is the simplicity of it. The monitor is light (4.6kg) and small so although it might not be the most ergonomically friendly thing in the world, you can plonk it down just about anywhere in your home (my review sample spent a lot of time on the kitchen table).

User reviews seemed on occasion to suggest that setting up the webcam was a challenge, but I had no such trouble; simply connect the monitor to your laptop/PC via the supplied USB-B to USB-A cable and you’re good to go.

To be honest, there’s not much wrong with the panel, either. Setting aside the stand and the webcam for a moment, the Asus BE24EQK is about as good as you’d expect a £200 FHD monitor to be. Viewing angles are good thanks to the IPS panel and, while performance is underwhelming, it’s nothing horrendous.

In default mode, the BE24EQK covered 87.4% of the sRGB colour gamut with an average colour variance (delta E) score of 1.98 – not too far shy of the optimum score of 1 or lower. A maximum delta E of 6 indicated that certain colours (red, in particular) were being reproduced inaccurately, but I’ve tested more expensive monitors that produced worse results and they didn’t have a webcam mounted on the top. These figures will put keen amateur/pro photographers off, but you can at least rest assured that the BE24EQK produces a decent image for the price.

If you dive into the onscreen display (OSD), you might be tempted to lock the BE24EQK in its dedicated sRGB mode but we’d advise against that. This mode lowers the overall gamut coverage and colour accuracy and locks the brightness at around 236cd/m², whereas in other modes, the monitor tops out at around 275cd/m². Neither result is terrible, but there’s little reason to switch to it or to delve into the settings at all; a shame, since the OSD is a pleasure to use, with big navigation buttons and a simple user interface.

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Asus BE24EQK review: What could be better?

Let’s face it: most of the appeal of the BE24EQK lies in its webcam. Unfortunately, at this price you’re not getting the greatest audiovisual fidelity. The BE24EQK’s webcam is, at best, passable. It struggles to cope with anything other than well-lit rooms and produces a fairly grainy image, regardless of lighting conditions. Automatic brightness correction is haphazard and you can forget about any kind of autofocus. The mic is better but nothing to write home about – recorded audio sounds like it’s coming through a tube.

To be clear, the webcam is still usable but it’s important to know that it’s definitely a budget video capture device, rather than anything you might consider using for streaming.

I should also bring up the monitor’s stand here, since it is phenomenally basic in its range of adjustment. As stated above, there’s no height adjustment or swivel – just tilt. It also has quite a large footprint for such a small monitor, with the square base proving intrusive if you’re working in a really tight space.

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Asus BE24EQK review: Should you buy it?

I can’t award the BE24EQK more than three stars given how truly barebones the panel, stand, webcam and microphone are, but that doesn’t mean you should steer clear. If you’re one of the many people still in sore need of a larger screen than your laptop offers and a webcam that doesn’t film up your nose from below, the BE24EQK is a bargain.

Just be sure you’re content with the sacrifices you’ll be making. If you can’t stomach them, consider splashing out a bit more on something like the Philips 241B7 for a superior webcam and a more flexible stand.