Monoprice 28″ CrystalPro Monitor, USB-C Driven 4K IPS For Well Under $400

Perfect For DLSS And FSR

With Bonus DisplayPort To HDMI Tests

Amongst the many devices Monoprice offers you will find a rather large assortment of monitors.  The company which started out offering low cost audio cables and adapters of high enough quality that they became the go to source for many musicians and audiophiles with a budget.  Now, they offer a wide variety of products, including the 28″ CrystalPro monitor which is what you will be taking a look at if you scroll down.  The HDR400 screen is not curved but does offer 4k @ 60Hz over HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.2 and USB-C which is something we need to see more of.

A Modern Monitor

The VGA connector should go, 36 years is a good enough run and it’s time to retire.  DVI is almost as bad, S-Video should have taught the lesson that putting tiny pins in connectors that are often under stress and frequently plugged and unplugged is a horrible idea.  Nonetheless, you can still pick up modern displays that feature it and often that little VGA plug can’t even handle the bandwidth to drive your display at full resolution and refresh rate.

HDMI and DisplayPort are the two current champions, each with their own proponents.  The delay in the release of DisplayPort 2.0 compatible devices has extended for so long it has been replaced by DP 2.1.  NVIDIA’s RTX 4xxx series still offers DP 1.4a, however both Intel and AMD finally incorporated DP 2.1 into their GPUs this generation.  The number of monitors that also support it are few and far between.

That leaves one more connector type, which is already widely in use and offers some tricks that none of the above can manage.  Monoprice quickly figured this out, offering a variety of panels such as the 28″ 4K UHD CrystalPro monitor that offer USB-C connectivity.  You get all the bandwidth of the other modern connectors for audio and video, it enables the USB out ports without needing an additional cable and it can power your laptop while it is working as your display.  The CrystalPro monitor is capable of providing up to 65W of power delivery which will be enough to charge many laptops; gaming laptops perhaps not so much.

It also has some legacy ports, for those that aren’t quite sold on USB-C yet.

Can You Stand A USB-C Display?

The stand is a little unique on the CrystalPro monitor, it does have screw holes for 75mm VESA but the stand it ships with has a circular locking mechanism.  This design does offer a nice benefit however, as you can easily rotate the screen from landscape to portrait mode without removing a single screw.  The base also features a circular mount, which lets you rotate the monitor up to 45° left or right should you so desire.  There is more than enough tilt to line it up as you wish, or to balance a monitor colorimeter on it while calibrating.

The base has enough weight that the monitor is well supported but also doesn’t take up the desk space some others with a similar design do.   The stand can be raised and lowered by a small amount, letting you dial in the exact height you need.  The cable management is simple but effective, a hole in the bottom of the stand keeps the cables all going in the same direction.  It is nice to see than not only does the stand not block access to the inputs but that those inputs are labelled in such a way that you can see them without cranking your neck into ridiculous positions.

OSD OCD

Monoprice did a good job on the OSD for the CrystalPro monitor, with a wide assortment of adjustments available for such a low cost 4k display.  The colour options a wide variety of options that let you adjust colour temperature, space and range including switching from RGB mode to YUV if you feel the need to go old school.  The view mode, which is only available when HDR10 is disabled, lets you swap between a number of presets for desktop use, gaming, movies and even a mode to make text sharper.

With HDR disabled you can set the response time to three different levels, something else that is taken away if you want to enable HDR for gaming.  The setup menu contains the usual suspects, the inclusion of the pixel clock is a nice and unexpected addition however.  The audio levels can be managed on the display as well, if you can’t handle the volume controls on your laptop for some reason.

As you should expect, these are all controlled by buttons underneath the monitor, you aren’t going to get a joystick control at this price point.

A Matter of Adaptation

Monoprice also sent along a DP 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 8K adapter to test out, as no one can agree on which ports to include on devices.  The adapter add-on business has gotten so lucrative that even buying a laptop and monitor from the same company will not guarantee that you will be able to connect one to the other without picking up an extra cable.  The widespread adoption of USB-C could easily solve this for the mobile industry and as many GPUs now add USB-C outputs, for the desktop as well.

Monoprice offers a 3 foot for $27.99, 6 feet at $29.99, and 10 feet for MSRP: $34.99, even compared to Cable2Go those are decent prices.  As price isn’t everything, a Datacolor Spider was used to see what the difference in image quality was between the four cables and three inputs.

As you can see from the results, the colour gamut remains the same for all four cables with a tiny difference well within the margin of error.  As for the image quality, it also remained the same even in Excel spreadsheets which are often extremely difficult for an adapter to handle.  The Monoprice DP to HDMI adapter is certainly worth the price of admission.   The results also show you don’t sacrifice anything for the additional capabilities of USB-C, which makes the new standard even more attractive.  This is without even considering the possibility of daisy chaining several monitors together.

What Do You Want From A Display?

That question is really what it all boils down to; what features do you absolutely have to have and what are you willing to pay for it?  This particular display hits a lot of most people want in a general purpose display.  It isn’t curved nor ultrawide for gamers, but that is what their Dark Matter and Zero-G lines do; which we should see in a future review.   The colour gamut won’t overly impress graphic artists, but they won’t be shopping for a $360 monitor in the first place.

HDR fans will also be a little disappointed, while it does offer an HDR10 toggle it still only offers HDR400.  Intel and NVIDIA can handle 10-bit colour and HDR, but remember if you run AMD you can’t have both.  If you enable HDR10 on the display with 10-bit enabled in the driver it will be still be disabled in Windows, though the monitor will still try, and your screen will randomly toggle between two brightness levels; not specific to this display but something you need to remember.  The fact that it disables a number of options when HDR is enabled is a casualty of the price point, a more talented display is going to cost you more.

If you are looking for a way to expand the screen size on a laptop you work on then the CrystalPro monitor series is an easy bet.  USB-C connectivity means it will work with your laptop without needing a display cable adapter, and if that laptop doesn’t have a discrete GPU then the 65W of power delivery means you won’t need a second power cable either.  Since it also turns your monitor into a USB hub for your mouse and keyboard, it frees up the limited ports on your laptop itself to make your day easier.  The fact you can instantly switch from landscape to portrait and back right out of the box may be very useful as well.

If you do have a desktop or a mobile discrete card, you won’t be able to charge off of the monitor but once the workday is over DLSS or FSR allow you to upscale your game to play at 4k, or at least a little better resolution than your GPU can handle natively.  It will also make your TV and movies look a lot better.  If the IPS panel isn’t your cup of tea, the 32″ CrystalDisplay monitor is VA and has an MSRP of $399.99 which is not a big jump in price.

As of posting both are currently on sale, the 28″ CrystalDisplay monitor is currently $289.99 while the 32″ is a mere $20 more.  It’s hard not to recommend them at those prices.