The Kuycon P20

The desire to own an Apple Studio Display has probably been hanging over most Mac desktop users since time immemorial (well, since 1998 at least, but most people are more familiar with the “modern” 2022-era look) for two reasons:

• It defines what a desktop Mac display should, ideally, look like–a black-edged, aluminium-backed slab with zero frills and impeccable image quality.
• It has, traditionally, been hilariously expensive along every single dimension, including polishing cloths, until the historic date of August 27^th this year.

And I, too, have always wanted one. But economics and insularity are part of the reason I never got one, although that hasn’t stopped me: I’ve always been curious about what it would be like to use a credible approximation of one, but with a twist: I like taller displays.

And now, I can confirm that this is probably the best single monitor set-up I’ve used for a long while:

Disclaimer: Kuycon supplied me with a P20 free of charge (well, actually two, but that’s part of the story) and this follows my review policy.

Getting here took several months. The first panel flickered, and pressing on a corner of the monitor improved things. I suspected a partially disconnected internal connector, but couldn’t confirm the cause, although I very strongly suspect shipment damage.

I returned the first unit, but the replacement arrived without a stand, so I couldn’t use it for many weeks. And then I went on vacation, and that further delayed things…

I finally set it up (again) on our living room desk (the space I now retire to whenever I’m not working, either due to needing clear separation from work or to my 3D printers making the office too noisy) and have now been using it properly for a few weeks.

And (spoiler) it’s pretty great.

First of all, I’ve always been a fan of the Microsoft Surface Studio–not the computer itself (which was far too feeble), but its screen size and 3:2 aspect ratio. Its 4500x3000 resolution was also exactly the same as the Kuycon P20.

My preference for taller displays goes back a long way–all the way back to the huge, monochrome 4:3 DECstations I used in college, and I still prefer those proportions to the modern 16:9 default that we seem to be saddled with in this age of video consumption.

Second, I’ve been using LG panels and a combo ultrawide and portrait setup at my office desk for quite some time now, largely because ultra-wides, despite their popularity for gaming and video editing, are actually a slow-burning hindrance when researching, writing or coding because of their comparatively limited screen height. I use my portrait display for coding, researching, final page layout stuff, and, increasingly, CAD and 3D modelling.

However, it’s a bit annoying to flip windows to and fro (even with Moom), so when I realised I had a shot at using a subtly taller, better balanced display with what I still think are the right proportions for me, I jumped at the chance.

Why do I care about this so much? Well, for three reasons, two of which are related to my physical health:

• I have high myopia, which makes the vertical space on my displays particularly important since anything off-centre, being invariably distorted by my corrective lenses, requires actual neck movement to view properly–even if my widescreen were curved, I would still have trouble seeing it clearly without moving my head.
• My back and neck have been giving me trouble, so being able to raise the screen to the centre of my visual field matters a lot to me.
• I simply prefer taller displays for productivity, as they allow me to see more content vertically without constantly scrolling.

In order to better convey my point of view on this, I had my “assistant” draw up this comparison:

The rectangles above are drawn to the same physical scale (which took some doing), leaving out bezels and stands.

I’ve also added a couple of insets showing how 4K and 1080p images fit at native 1:1 pixels, rather than the physical sizes of other monitors. You can futz with desktop scaling to change how much content fits and how large the text is, but the panel proportions stay the same–and the comparison makes those much clearer than diagonal sizes alone.

The P20 has a 28.2-inch IPS panel running at 4500x3000 and 60Hz, with a 3:2 aspect ratio (also written as 4.5:3). That gives it about 22% more pixels than my 5120x2160 LG ultra-wide, arranged in a much taller, narrower workspace–and a bit sharper, too.

The monitor and stand come in separate boxes (even though the illustration on the monitor box shows both, the stand is in the box on the right).

Inside the main box, everything’s neatly packed:

Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, this is very heavily based on what we’ve come to consider Apple design language, from the glossy display, thin black bezels and all-aluminium look to the back vents:

And yes, that is part of the reason I was intrigued by the P20 in the first place, and a controversial aspect for some, but what matters is what the hardware can do for you, and how.

Besides the sturdy aluminium stand (which I like the look of, and which allows the P20 to be rotated 90°, if you want), the monitor itself ships with a stylish VESA mounting bracket:

The bracket itself appears to be machined out of a couple of solid plates of aluminium and is well designed in terms of strain relief, but as it happens none of my monitor arms was strong enough to hold the monitor without noticeably straining and drooping (my LGs are, after all, encased in light plastic), so I had to wait for the replacement stand.

The solid aluminium stand holds it steady. It does require some assembly, but nothing overly complicated:

Once the stand arrived, its height adjustment let me put the screen at the centre of my visual field–the top stop is high enough to get it where I want it.

You get 2 HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, and a USB-C port as inputs, plus a USB-C hub with 2 additional ports for peripherals (I plugged a Logitech Brio 4K into one of them) and a headphone jack.

Note that there are no speakers on this monitor (and likely no good place to put them inside the chassis), so you’ll need to rely on external audio solutions.

As you would expect, we plugged everything we could into the monitor to see how it would handle different connections:

• All our Macs (including old Intel ones) worked without any issues.
• Our Windows machines, both Intel and ARM, also had no trouble detecting and using the monitor at full resolution (and HDR where supported, which was the usual hit-and-miss in Windows).
• Our Linux machines also detected and used the monitor without any major issues–I even wrote a Noctalia shell extension for my MiniBook X for managing monitor placement in Niri.
• The iPad Pro worked seamlessly, as discussed in the next section.
• And a Chromebook I tested also worked without any issues (except for resolution limitations due to its ARM hardware).

The only input I was unable to test was DisplayPort, simply because we have zero machines in the house with it–most of the laptops and SBCs I used connected to the monitor’s USB-C input, including those with Thunderbolt ports.

My trusty old Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga had no real trouble driving it at full resolution (albeit at 30Hz) via HDMI. I also tried a few USB-C to HDMI adapters, including one of my trusty travel cables, without any significant issues (other than 4K limitations in some of the converters, which was expected).

To put it bluntly, this thing is glorious to use with my iPad Pro. Completely overkill, but also completely right as far as screen proportions and resolution are concerned, even if Apple still provides essentially zero control over any monitor features other than HDR:

I worked on this draft on the P20 itself using my iPad Pro (Obsidian on the right of the display, references on the left, and Notes on my iPad just below the monitor), and I would make that a habit if it were easier to manage and split windows on iPadOS:

One of my teens, who is just as obsessively attuned to colour as I am, spent an afternoon trying to adjust the P20 to a close match of what our MacBook screens can do and eventually gave up–with or without HDR, our unit had a salmon/pink/warm tint that we just couldn’t get to go away for a while.

I don’t have any colour calibration hardware and I tend to only edit photos on my iPad these days out of sheer convenience (and, let’s face it, due to having given up any pretence at doing “pro” photography over the years), but that tint was something I noticed immediately, even after trying the various DCI-P3 profiles macOS offered in its settings window.

The monitor’s own DCI-P3 and sRGB modes didn’t resolve it either, so we’ve settled on turning off HDR and using its “User” and “Cool” colour settings instead–that and some more judicious tweaking of other settings finally removed the tint, so expect spending some time fiddling with settings on both ends if you’re fussy.

It was impossible to do a true side-by-side with my LG monitors because of plain physics (I don’t have a big enough desk, and swapping one of my monitors for testing the P20 alongside would require me to rewire a bunch of things), but we still haven’t been able to get the colours quite right, in any setup.

HDR mode was… OK, I guess.

But with HDR enabled, I couldn’t adjust the monitor’s colour settings (and the iPad offered no help there, either):

Note that I’ve mostly given up on it on computers both due to the wide variation in colour gamuts and the fact that it only really works for me on the Mac (and even then mostly on internal displays), so none of my machines are set to output HDR–but letting YouTube HDR videos play out at 4K on the P20 while I worked provided some uncanny “this feels like a window” moments, even if some of it was over-saturated until I settled on a colour space I liked.

In my tests, switching to HDR made the desktop look washed out, with muted colours on regular screen elements, and switching back made the difference particularly obvious on the P20. Even on the Mac, some YouTube footage was completely washed out in HDR mode–I couldn’t isolate whether that was down to the content, the software or the monitor.

Feature-wise, the one thing I found myself missing in the P20 was the ability to display two inputs–although it would likely have been pretty awkward in this 4.5:3 aspect ratio, I do use that capability a lot on my LG ultra-wide (to have work and personal machines alongside, in an approximately 4:3 ratio) and on my LG Dual Up (to have my Mac and an SBC, or a TV dongle to watch the news in more troubled times).

I was not a fan of the remote:

My objection is to having another remote at all: it’s the kind of loose end that I invariably end up losing or finding with a dead battery in between the three times I am likely to use it every year (which has been the fate of most non-TV remotes in the house). I already have three of these things for different kinds of portable monitors and gadgets, and those never work reliably.

I’d have much preferred an LG-like five-way switch to another remote to keep track of.

There are no built-in speakers, so if you want audio beyond what your computer or tablet provides, you’ll need separate speakers or headphones.

I didn’t miss them myself–the MacBook, my iPad and the Surface Laptop I was working on all have great speakers, and the only mild annoyance was when any of the machines forgot to keep using its internal speakers.

After all the delays, the P20 has actually been a very good fit for the way I work. I like the height, the resolution and being able to write or research without shuffling windows between two displays, and I particularly like using it with the iPad–so much that it is going to stay on my living room desk (where I retire to focus and write) for the foreseeable future.

And not just for myself, since with college-aged children around, having an extra display in the living room has proven to be extremely useful for everyone in the household–although fights haven’t broken out over it yet.

The colour tint is the only reservation I’d have before recommending it to anyone doing colour-critical work. I don’t have calibration measurements, but both of us could see it, and settling on a cooler preset isn’t the same as correcting it. But we did manage to offset it, so I would rate it as “finicky”.

But for my purposes–writing, coding and everyday use, plus occasional Shapr3D sessions–the proportions are still perfect to my eyes.