UPerfect BE16CU Portable Monitor (4K, 16-inch)

Pros & Cons

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  Bright, matte display
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  High-resolution panel
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  Colorful
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  Supports pass-through power

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  Occasional diagonal screen door-like pattern
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  Falls short of advertised specs
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  Bland design
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  Poor speakers
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  Needs auxiliary power for max brightness

If you’ve shopped for a portable monitor recently, you’ll have seen many that look nearly identical to the UPerfect BE16CU. It’s about as plain as they come, with an aluminum frame, some screw holes on the back for VESA mounting, a few ports on its left edge, controls on its right and a folding folio cover that doubles as a rudimentary stand. What sets the BE16CU apart is its promise of ultrahigh brightness — up to 1,200 nits.

Combine that brightness with its matte finish, and you’ve got a recipe for easy viewing in most lighting conditions. While the BE16CU is indeed plenty bright — the brightest I’ve tested in fact — it falls short of its specs and requires auxiliary power to reach its maximum brightness. Neither of those things is especially unusual for portable displays, though; it’s tough to stand out in a sea of lookalikes, so a beefed-up spec or two is sadly the norm. I also got some odd results during my testing, so I got a second sample… which solved some issues and added others. Overall, it’s a good, high-brightness portable monitor, just with a caveat or two.

UPerfect BE16CU Specs

Taking power from a laptop, I measured the BE16CU at just 271 nits with my original sample. Powered separately with the included 30-watt charger, it managed a peak of 890 nits. No matter what settings I tweaked — HDR on, HDR off, different white points —  I couldn’t get more than 890 nits, well shy of the advertised 1,200 nits. 

However, that’s enough brightness to compete with a lot of light hitting the display. Not direct sunlight or even strong artificial lighting reflecting perfectly into your eyes, but still. And to be fair, an extra 300 nits likely wouldn’t help much in those cases, either. You’ll still want to shift the angle to avoid direct glare.

It’s also worth mentioning that the kinds of outdoor setups where you might want ultrabright displays aren’t always somewhere auxiliary power is available, at which point the BE16CU is no brighter than its competition. If you need the extra nit output away from an outlet, a good power bank will work.

Mark Knapp/CNET

The display, my first sample anyway, also failed to hit its advertised 1,500:1 contrast ratio, though that kind of failure is exceedingly common in this space. I measured a peak of 1,110:1 using a checkerboard pattern.

With a lower average picture level, I measured contrast as high as 1,262:1, but that’s still falling short of the spec and no longer directly comparable to our other testing. It’s a shame not to hit the advertised levels, but the performance is still acceptable and typical of an IPS panel.  

Color performance is a mixed bag. The monitor achieved 100% coverage of the sRGB color space and 98% of DCI-P3, but accuracy falls a tad short of what you’d want for professional color work. The display’s white point is very cool as well, measuring 10,300K in standard mode.

It offers several different color temperatures, but none are accurate. The 7,500K mode actually measured at 9,700K, for instance, and the 5,600K mode was actually even cooler at 10,500K. Only the sRGB mode came reasonably close, hitting 7,700K, but it had a much dimmer 442-nit peak brightness and a weaker 650:1 contrast ratio. 

Mark Knapp/CNET

The slightly off-spec performance might be due to a possible issue I found with the panel. With 3,840×2,400-pixel resolution on a 16-inch panel, it should appear very sharp, and it does, but there were fine diagonal lines cutting across the display (perhaps part of the matte finish) that interfered with the perceived sharpness. They were quite visible when viewing text on a white background, but slightly obscured when viewing the display perfectly head-on.

The lines could also create interference patterns when certain patterns panned across the screen. It’s also possible these diagonal lines contribute to the brightness shortcomings, since they likely block some of the light from reaching my colorimeter. To double-check my results, I got a second sample. More on those results in the next section.

The BE16CU’s speakers are pretty poor. They have a very tight sweet spot centered in the vocal range, so there’s OK sound for people speaking, but little else. I tried listening to a song that started with a bass line, and I thought the monitor was muted because no audible sound came out. 

A second chance?

Given how far the BE16CU missed its mark on both brightness and contrast, plus the odd diagonal lines, I figured it might be a faulty unit. I got a second sample and opened a can of worms in the process. 

Mark Knapp/CNET

The new unit was outwardly identical, with the same model number, but it had some staggering differences. The subtle diagonal lines visible on the first unit were gone. The extremely cool color temperature was also gone, replaced by a much more palatable 6,600K white point. This unit even proved brighter, though still fell short of spec, at 1,053 nits. It did manage to hit a 1,530:1 contrast ratio, but that performance was somewhat undercut by the fact that this unit came from Amazon, which lists a 2,000:1 contrast ratio. 

While those were improvements over my first sample, sadly, the wide color gamut was gone on this one, achieving only 98% sRGB coverage and 81% DCI-P3 coverage. 

What this suggests to me is that both units are fully functional and neither is faulty. Instead, UPerfect likely uses different LCD panels during a production run and perhaps sends different retail outlets slightly different builds. They also might not be diligent about ensuring that the various panels they use meet the advertised specifications. Regardless, it means that if you purchase a BE16CU, it should have performance similar to the ones we tested, but it’s impossible to say exactly how close they’ll be and to which one.

Is the UPerfect BE16CU worth it?

Ultimately, the BE16CU may be a decent monitor with good visual clarity and a conveniently portable design, but it isn’t quite what it advertises itself to be. It’s far brighter than competitors, but not quite as bright as its specs claim. You also won’t get that brightness without auxiliary power.

The bigger issue is that while it might be fine if you care only about brightness and resolution, if you care about contrast and color, you’ll be spinning a roulette wheel for what performance you might get. If you get one that doesn’t seem like what you expected, you might need to return it and order another. However, that’s not a road I’d readily suggest anyone go down. 

Mark Knapp/CNET

If you can get by with slightly lower sharpness and brightness, the Arzopa Z1RC remains a value-minded favorite, and UPerfect’s own BE173BU isn’t as bright but at least did a better job matching its advertised specs.  

Finding the right BE16CU 

The first BE16CU I tested was sent directly from UPerfect and has a listing here with a $359 list price and $279 sale price since the beginning of April, according to Google Shopping insights. It’s also available on Amazon at an even lower price and theoretically the same.

Some details in the Amazon listing raise a little concern, though. For instance, it lists an even higher contrast ratio and a different color gamut. It also has some dubious claims, such as the monitor running under direct sunlight while powered only by a Nintendo Switch and a little “4K UHD 16:9” badge, despite the monitor being 16:10 even in the Amazon listing. Still, UPerfect confirmed with me that the Amazon listing is the same model.

How we test monitors

Measurements for the UPerfect BE16CU were taken using a Spyder X2 Ultra colorimeter using DataColor’s Spyder X2 software for SDR. Color accuracy measurements results are reported in Delta E 1976 using Datacolor’s 48-color patch test.

In addition, HDR results were gathered using the VESA DisplayHDR Test app’s patterns to display 100% and 10% windows for brightness measurements, as well as RGBW values, again measured using the Spyder X2 Ultra, to get CIE xyY color values and compare against the DCI-P3 color space’s xyY color values to calculate HDR gamut coverage using this gamut calculator.

On the most basic models, we may stick with just brightness, contrast and color gamut, while on more capable displays, we may run tests of most user-selectable modes for gaming or color-critical usage, uniformity and so on. For the color work, we may also run tests to verify how white point accuracy varies with brightness. We also use Blur Busters’ motion tests to judge motion artifacts (such as ghosting) or refresh rate-related problems that can affect gaming.