A couple of months ago I decided to purchase a NEC MultiSync PA322UHD-2 monitor from B&H in the US. The monitor ticked all the right boxes. But when the unit arrived I was greeted with a defect in the panel. There was a dark spot appearing in front of the RGB sub pixels that was quite annoying. The spot was definitely behind the glass layer, but it was not a pixel defect as the area moved relative with your viewpoint.

I reached out to NEC technical support and after sending through a photo of the issue and my invoice, they RMA-ed the unit. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. But the journey was far from over.

The replacement unit was actually worse. It too had the same defect, but in a different location on the panel. It also had additional spots. So back it went and another unit was sent. Same thing - if you were keeping count, this is now unit number 3.

The third monitor also developed two dead sub pixels after 1 week of use:

I asked NEC to please review the unit before sending the 4th one to me.So they had one sent from their US depot for in case it was a bad batch. The unit arrived... and it was the worst of the bunch.

So in total I have purchased one monitor and had 3 RMA unit sent to me. All four had the same defects in random locations on the screen. By this time I was very conflicted. On the one hand, the monitor is by far the best I have ever laid eyes on. The illumination uniformity, colour accuracy, 99% AdobeRGB coverage and 4K 31.5" size made it perfect for my photography and software development needs. The only better screen costs $7500 and is from a company called Eizo - which is much more than I feel I should need to pay for a working monitor of this caliber.

Through all of this NEC support had been incredibly good. NEC QA on their monitors not so much.

There was an additional problem with the monitor - in fact, with at least 3 of the four I had. Randomly during the day, I would see a flickering of weird lines of pixels on the upper half of the monitor. See the video below for an example.

I reached out to NEC again, and after a bit of a misunderstanding on their part they sent me a firmware update. Lo and behold - it fixed the issue. At least, it has been 3 days and I have yet to see this issue appear.

In summary, I love the NEC display - the one I kept still has a defect and two dead sub pixels, but they are not too distracting. The sub pixels fall within all manufacturers' policies for dead pixels so that is what it is. The defect - not so much. So I am unhappy with their QA on these panels. The NEC EA275UHD monitor I have is perfect in all regards, but does not have the AdobeRGB colour gamut and is only 27" making it harder to work at native resolution.

That said, their tech support is the best I have encountered, ever. I have read reviews that stated the opposite, but my experience with them will definitely have me buy NEC in the future without hesitation.