I've owned this particular model. It was "ok" except for a couple of issues:
- Cracking and popping noises from the plastic. As the room you're in cools or warms, this thing snaps and pops with the best of them. It's worst at night time when it's quiet and the plastic frame goes <SNAP> out of nowhere. Pretty annoying. Solid on ebay for $110 ish. It's far worse than even the most snappy/poppy Dell models.
- The SRGB profile is pretty bad. You need do use custom settings to ensure the reds aren't completely blasted out and over saturated. Then you're stuck using a non-standard profile, once you actually get things looking ok.
Actually, I wouldn't recommend this thing at all. Especially now that there's so many better options out there for IPS and IPS-like panels.
never had the frame issues your talking about and it has the same frame as just about ever other PA and PB ASUS monitor which non have had that issue and yes out of every PA monitor they have put out it by far has the worst pannel and lookup table though if you look at the specs you should have realised that. Also my panel came calibrated fairly decently actually. With your other problems could you have just got a bad one?
My wife ended up with it as a hand-me-down, she couldn't stand the cracking noises. Perhaps climate was a factor? We're quite humid and warm here.
I wasn't expecting color profile perfection, but the hyper-saturated reds were still a surprise. It just seemed very poorly calibrated, because you could correct much of it with your own profile and/or hardware calibration.
I work purely in the realm of digital+web, so I prefer monitors that have a legit SRGB profile which doesn't require mods.
I ended up with an Apple thunderbolt display. Everyone knows the disadvantages of these (cost, shiny glass, etc), but it's still proved a wise choice given the great stock SRGB profile. There's now cheap korean displays with the same panel and similar backlighting. I'd probably go for one of those, or that bare-bones HP model.