ALOGIC Clarity Pro Touch Review - 27-inch Touchscreen 4K Monitor

Introduction & Specification Details and Close-up

ALOGIC's Clarity Pro Touch is aimed at creatives who want to add a little flare to their workflow but also want all of the right specifications covered for optimized performance.

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The Clarity Pro Touch is a 27-inch IPS 4K (UHD) monitor with a wide variety of features designed to accommodate the workflow of someone spending time with creative processes, such as photo/video editing and digital artwork. ALOGIC also includes touch capabilities that work with Windows and Mac devices. Moreover, the Clarity Pro Touch is designed with ergonomics in mind, with a wide range of height, tilt, swivel, and pivot adjustment.

Furthermore, the IPS panel combined with 3840 x 2160 (4K) resolution creates an extremely sharp image across the entire 27-inch display, with no image degradation around the edges. This lends more to the idea the Clarity Pro Touch would be great for creative workflows that call for optimized and accurate colors. Lastly, ALOGIC has decided to include a webcam within the housing of the Clarity Pro Touch, along with a USB hub for increased connectivity. Let's see if the Clarity Pro Touch is worth the $1199 price tag.

Specifications

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Close-up

ALOGIC Clarity Pro Touch

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$898.00	$898.00	$829.00	-	Buy
	$959.00	$959.00	$959.00	-	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 9/10/2024 at 6:33 am CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission from any sales.

Design

The Clarity Pro Touch is one of the best-looking monitors I have come across, with its two-piece aluminium stand combined with the aluminium housing makes for a monitor that both looks great aesthetically and provides that premium build quality feel. Keeping to the stand, the overall weight of it is quite considerable, which provides confidence the monitor won't wobble too much when a desk is knocked. The stand also features a hole close to the base for cable management.

Moving to the back of the monitor, you will find ventilation holes of various sizes at the top and bottom. These provide airflow to the back of the monitor to cool the components and make them look awesome. Throughout my time reviewing monitors, I haven't come across one that uses a circular ventilation hole design. Keeping to the back, and moving down to the connectivity options, ALOGIC has outfitted the Clarity Pro Touch with an assortment of USB ports. I have some gripes with these ports, but the monitor has 1x USB-C, 2x USB-A, 1x USB-B, 2x HDMI 2.1 ports, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

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The USB-A ports will work at their designated USB 3.0 speeds when the USB-B cable is plugged into a PC. If the Clarity Pro Touch is plugged in via its USB-C port, for example, a MacBook, the USB-A ports will downscale to USB 2.0 speeds. While USB 2.0 speeds are fine for connecting most peripherals, such as keyboards and mice, it probably isn't enough for the transferring of creative content, such as high-resolution images or videos. This means Apple users who want access to those ports at full speeds must purchase an adapter for their device to connect the USB-B cable.

Moving to the top of the Clarity Pro Touch, ALOGIC has included an 8-megapixel pop-up webcam, which has a built-in privacy feature that only pops up when the camera is in use. Additionally, ALOGIC has included two built-in 5w speakers that I definitely wouldn't recommend. They are enough to get by but are by no means considered a highlightable aspect of the Clarity Pro Touch. Moving back down to the base of the monitor, ALOGIC has placed the power button in the bottom right-hand corner, which is accompanied by a nice white glow when powered on.

Next to the power button is the controls for the Clarity Pro Touch's On-Screen Display (OSD) options. Unfortunately, the layout of four OSD control buttons isn't loved as it just provides a janky experience when trying to navigate the already laggy OSD options. I would have preferred much more if ALOGIC had opted for a multi-directional joystick with a pressable center button, which has seemingly become commonplace in many gaming monitors.

Overall, the physical design of the Clarity Pro Touch feels very premium, with an extremely high build quality that is coupled with gorgeous aesthetics and a few moderate downsides.

Panel Breakdown

The Clarity Pro Touch is sporting a 27-inch 4K IPS display that, as I mentioned in the introduction, provides incredible color accuracy and visuals. The 178-degree viewing angle ensures that no matter what orientation the Clarity Pro Touch is in, whether it be vertical or horizontal, viewers will always get a clear picture. Moreover, the panel within the Clarity Pro Touch is capable of sRGB color coverage at 100%, along with 100% of Adobe RGB coverage. Moving to DCI-P3, which is used for digital video color correction, the Clarity Pro Touch hits 97% gamut coverage.

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If the color isn't to your liking, ALOGIC has provided a large selection of OSD options for any necessary tweaking. However, it will take some time before a user is able to confidently navigate the OSD menu, as its layout is tiled with images representing each of the setting categories. On top of that, the images used to represent these categories aren't commonly used images for those categories, meaning a user won't immediately recognize which setting they are diving into until they have already pressed on that option. Unfortunately, the problems don't stop there.

On top of not being able to recognize the target settings, the OSD control buttons are quite laggy, making navigation frustrating and time-consuming. The touchscreen functionality also doesn't work with the OSD options, which is annoying as it would make perfect sense for the tiled OSD design.

Touch

The touch functionality supports 10-points, or 10-fingers, and comes with multi-touch gestures such as pinches, swipes, and scrolling. Mac support requires downloading the UPDD Commander app, which adds significant functionality if you can work out how to use it. Users can customize a list of touch gestures that can be used for hiding/showing the dock, two-finger rotating, pinching, and more. Additionally, separate gestures can be mapped to specific apps, meaning users can customize which gestures are enabled when an app is open.

Unfortunately, the UPDD Commander app doesn't hold a user's hand with its setup, and when first presented with it, users will likely feel completely overwhelmed by all of the options. Users will need to take some time to learn how to use the app and also spend some time mapping all of the right gestures to their linked apps. Once all that is complete, the full touch capabilities of the Clarity Pro Touch will be unlocked on Mac.

For Windows, the process is much more streamlined and only requires the additional connection of the USB-C cable to enable the functionality.

Performance

As I previously outlined in the Panel Breakdown section of this review, the Clarity Pro Touch has incredible performance when it comes to color accuracy and image quality. I tested the display in various video editing workloads and Photoshop editing sessions and was pleasantly pleased with the results. I wasn't provided with a drawing pen, but the Clarity Pro Touch does come with drawing capabilities. Unfortunately, the monitor doesn't support pressure-sensitive touch, which are sensors that can measure the strength of a touch. This feature is particularly handy for designers using a stylus to draw various-sized lines as it removes the need to manually switch the line size and overall provides a more natural drawing feel.

Final Thoughts

The ALOGIC Clarity Pro Touch is a creatives monitor that comes with a few downsides but great performance. But is it worth the $1199 price tag?

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That entirely depends on what platform you are on. For Windows users looking to explore the world of touchscreen capabilities, I wouldn't recommend dropping more than $1000 on a touchscreen monitor; instead, I would recommend purchasing a cheaper tablet. However, if you are a Windows user and need a monitor optimized for creative workflow and touchscreen functionality, I recommend the Clarity Pro Touch. At the very least, the Clarity Pro Touch has incredible color accuracy and image clarity, which means the touch capabilities are just a bonus.

However, if you are on macOS, I wouldn't recommend the Clarity Pro Touch unless you don't mind a lengthy setup. The software used to get the Clarity Pro Touch working on Mac needs to be more streamlined so that I can confidently recommend it to all Mac users. The lack of plug-and-play on Mac and the setup required for the software leads me to warn Mac users about the additional time required for a completed setup. If that isn't a problem, in-depth customization piques your interest, and then the Clarity Pro Touch would be a great addition.

A last criticism of the Clarity Pro Touch is its reduced USB-C passthrough charging. The Clarity Pro Touch supports 65W versus the 90W charging on the Clarity variant. The reason is 25W is reserved for providing power to the in-built webcam. This I view as a considerable downgrade, especially when users can take advantage of software that enables their smartphone camera to be used as a webcam. On the other hand, 65W should be enough for most laptops and below charging purposes.

Overall, the Clarity Pro Touch is a decent monitor designed for creative workflows and equipped with touch capabilities. Users with creative-based workflows will appreciate the image clarity and gorgeous aesthetics and perhaps come to enjoy the oddity of using a touchscreen monitor.