The ASUS ZenBook 3 Review: A Convincing Case for Quad Core Thin & Light Laptops

Display Analysis

ASUS has gone fairly conservative with the display options for the ZenBook 3, as the only display choice as a 1920x1080 14-inch panel. It’s not low resolution by any means, with a 157 pixel-per-inch density, but compared to the UHD offerings, it seems like it is. Still, in a 14-inch laptop, it’s a reasonable resolution, and will hopefully pay dividends when we get to battery life. It’s still great to see a 14-inch panel in a laptop of this size, and the slim bezels help out here.

ASUS has targeted 100% of the sRGB gamut, and we’ll see how they did shortly. By not going with a wider gamut display, they don’t need to deal with the shortcomings of Windows in terms of color management.

The display features a Corning Gorilla Glass 5 cover, which should help prevent damage, but there’s no touch available. There’s also no support for a pen. It would be nice to see a touch option, even if not everyone would use it, but for traditional laptop functions, you can get by with the Precision touchpad.

To test display accuracy and performance, we use SpectraCal’s CalMAN suite, along with an X-Rite i1DisplayPro colorimeter for brightness and contrast measurements, and an X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrophotometer for color accuracy.

Brightness and Contrast

The ZenBook 3 doesn’t offer a very bright display, and would struggle to be used outdoors or in bright sunlight. It does offer great contrast though, coming in near the top of the list in that department. On the bright side, it can get fairly dim, with a minimum brightness of just 13 nits.

Grayscale

SpectraCal CalMAN

Testing the grayscale demonstrates some immediate issues with the display. The gamma is far from the ideal 2.2, and the blue levels creep up with brighter whites, while the reds drop off, resulting in a very cool display. The overall average dE isn’t terrible, but ASUS has never calibrated their laptop displays, and clearly they haven't started with the ZenBook 3.

Gamut

SpectraCal CalMAN

Coming from the grayscale results, it’s not a surprise to see that the blue levels are oversaturated on this display, with the 100% blue values well outside the sRGB range.

Saturation

SpectraCal CalMAN

Our saturation sweeps show that all of the primaries are not quite where they should be, which drag the secondary colors out as well. The overall error level isn’t massive, but on a high cost device, there’s not a great reason to see the lack of any work done on color accuracy.

Gretag Macbeth

SpectraCal CalMAN

The Gretag Macbeth test covers a wide range of colors, and can show errors with colors such as flesh tones, even if the primary and secondary colors are not too bad, and that’s the case here. The overall error level average isn’t terrible, but on a premium device you should expect better.

SpectraCal CalMAN

This image shows the relative color error levels that you’d see on this device, with the displayed color on the top, and the correct color on the bottom. Your own display may impact these results though if it isn’t accurate, which is why this is only a relative difference.

Display Conclusion

ASUS has never been a company that has done any sort of color calibration on their displays, and that is clearly the case here again. On a low-cost device, you can overlook this, but some of the competition at this level does do individual calibration on their devices. If you’re after a notebook just for office tasks, these color errors will only be an annoyance, but if you’re after something to edit video or photography, you should likely look elsewhere.