This one has a few things in its favor, though. Also, similar control surfaces can look cool but often end up in drawers, never to be used. I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it’s a gimmick, as it takes up space and adds complexity. The other attention-grabbing feature is the ProArt Dial. That raises the question of whether OLED or mini-LED is more desirable on a creator laptop, but personally, I’d take the superior OLED blacks over eye-scorching brightness and haloing. However, it’s well short of the 1,600 nits peak brightness available on the latest MacBook Pros, which use mini-LED displays. You can crank the brightness up to 550 nits in HDR mode, so it conforms to VESA’s DisplayHDR True Black 500 standard for OLED displays - very bright indeed for a laptop display.
icm profile for Windows Color Management. That could be a handy setting in the Creator Hub, for example, or at least as an. Given that the display is suitable for color correction, ASUS should have perhaps included a way to easily change the color profile for video editing ( Rec.709, DCI-P3 and so on) or photos (AdobeRGB, sRGB). The 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio with inky OLED blacks also makes it ideal for content creation, with a side benefit that it’s the best entertainment laptop I’ve ever used. Along with the color accuracy, that allows for precise color correction controls in apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Lightroom Classic.
The true 10-bit panel offers 100 percent DCI-P3 color coverage, in workstation laptop territory and well beyond rivals like the MacBook Pro (78 percent) and Dell’s XPS 15 (85 percent). I used it with a $4,000 ASUS mini-LED ProArt monitor and despite the display technology differences, they matched very closely to my eyes, color wise.
The panel is factory-calibrated to Pantone and Calman color accuracy, with a delta E of less than two, a fact that I confirmed with my X-Rite i1 Display Pro calibrator. As you’d expect, it’s sharp, vibrant and beautiful in person - by far the best laptop display I’ve ever seen in terms of fidelity and “wow” factor. The headline feature on this laptop is the 3,480 x 2,400 16:10 OLED display, the first on a 16-inch laptop, ASUS claims. Overall, heat and noise are very well managed. Still, it could be a handy mode if you’re planning to leave the room while doing a render. Fan noise is still reasonable in performance mode unless you’re doing GPU/CPU intensive chores, but the full-speed setting can get very loud indeed. If you need more punch, you can switch to performance mode which boosts power to 95 watts, or up to 135 watts in “full-speed” mode. It does that through the use of dual 102-blade fans, six heat pipes and multiple ducts. 77-inch thickness and 5.28 pound heft, it’s relatively compact - especially considering that it offers “military-grade durability” (MIL-STD 810H), according to ASUS.ĪSUS has developed an “IceCool Pro” thermal solution that’s supposed to boost airflow by up to 16 percent, while keeping noise levels below 40 dbA in standard cooling mode. It has bezels that are reasonably small but not what I’d call thin, and isn’t the lightest or smallest 16-inch laptop out there. To that end, it has a basic black, square-edged body with the only noticeable design touch being the subtle ProArt logo on top. A key feature of all the Studiobook devices is the businesslike looks that are far away from ASUS’s gaming designs.