Arzopa Z1RC Monitor Review: Affordable, Portable and Well Built

More screen space can mean getting more done, and the Arzopa Z1RC aims to help you take that advantage with you on the go. This portable monitor offers a 16-inch, 2,560x1,600-pixel display in a sturdy and sleek metal package that's just 0.4 inches thick and 1.8 pounds. It offers a solid upgrade for portable productivity, and though its full retail price is $189, the street prices fall closer to $120, which is an attractive price for a monitor promising so much.

The Arzopa Z1RC largely delivers a good experience, providing a fairly wide color gamut, sharp visuals, easy visibility with respectable brightness and strong anti-glare qualities, but it's not quite as capable as the specs make it seem. HDR performance is abysmal, color accuracy is a little off at best or wildly off at worst, and the brightness level never quite hits the 500 nits Arzopa advertises. Still, if you can snag the monitor at its reduced price, it's offering a lot for the money.

Beyond the panel itself, the Arzopa Z1RC includes some convenient aspects. The display sits on little rubber feet when in landscape orientation, and it includes a long kickstand that can prop it up at a range of angles from nearly vertical to about 45 degrees. The kickstand will also let you flip the monitor up into a vertical orientation, although it doesn't have rubber feet for stability or the option to adjust the angle in that orientation. The monitor also won't automatically rotate the input, so you'll have to dive into your display settings to change the orientation. 

Arzopa sticks all of its inputs in the bottom left corner. There, you'll find two USB-C ports that handle both power and video signals. There's also a Mini-HDMI port. It's a little unfortunate that the USB-C ports weren't split, as that would provide more flexibility for setup, especially as many laptops include their USB-C ports on just the left side.

Arzopa includes a USB-C-to-USB-C cable, USB-A-to-C cable, and Mini-HDMI-to-HDMI cable, providing you with most of the options you might need to get up and running. The connection can be a little picky about what it'll accept. Using one laptop with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 port that supports DisplayPort output, I was able to power up the monitor, but it wouldn't detect any display signal. If I then plugged a USB-C power cable into the monitor, it would then recognize the display input from the first USB-C cable, but only as long as the power cable was plugged in. Connecting another laptop with a USB4 port to the monitor using USB-C proved enough to power the Arzopa Z1RC and send a video signal. Depending on your setup, you may have to play around with various cable connections to get video and power.

All the Z1RC's ports are in one spot.

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The monitor's controls are simple and effective, and like its inputs, they are all in one place. The onscreen display provides access to a handful of settings: brightness, display profile, three-axis color levels, OSD position, blue-light level, volume and a few less-critical settings.

The Arzopa Z1RC fits a pair of 1-watt speakers on either side. They provide some audio if you're using the monitor with a device that doesn't have any speakers, the quality and volume are such that you won't want to rely on them for much. The sound is fairly thin, and your phone, tablet or laptop likely has better sound. 

In testing, the Z1RC proved itself to have some commendable qualities. Notably, it provides a respectable color gamut across all of its settings, readily achieving 100% coverage of the sRGB color space and covering more than 90% of the DCI-P3 color space. At its maximum brightness, it also achieves well over 300 nits alongside a 1,080:1 contrast ratio, which is good to see from a budget monitor and all that much easier to view thanks to the impressive anti-glare finish of the display.

The Arzopa Z1RC might have seemed more impressive if it were doing a better job living up to the company's performance claims. It measured at a peak of 365.3 nits in its default mode with brightness raised to its maximum, but that falls well short of the rated 500 nits. None of the other settings offered a meaningful improvement to the brightness level either. The brightness also comes at the cost of a colder white point at 8,100K, which can put a bit of strain on the eyes. Arzopa includes a setting for dialing back the blue light, but it comes with some reduction in overall brightness. 

The Z1RC can stand horizontally or vertically on its kickstand. 

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A handful of other profiles are available, they do little to benefit the Arzopa Z1RC. Each profile appears to be doing little more than shifting around how colors are presented. All of them slightly reduce the color gamut, most decrease the contrast ratio and a handful offer staggering blows to the color accuracy. The color accuracy of the monitor at default is good, but it would take calibration to hit a level viable for professional use. There's a Game mode too, but like the rest, it does little to improve the experience and it has no apparent advantage for gaming as latency and pixel response time are still just average for a 60Hz IPS panel. 

The Arzopa Z1RC reportedly supports HDR, and this is where I thought the claimed 500-nit brightness might be hiding, but by all accounts, the HDR settings do nothing to offer a meaningful HDR experience. Enabling HDR only seems to create a worse overall experience. The monitor has an automatic HDR setting, but it first needs to be enabled; otherwise, the monitor won't automatically recognize an HDR signal coming from a connected computer, and you'll get a completely washed-out image. With HDR Auto enabled and an HDR signal coming from the computer, you still get a downgrade in quality.

The built-in kickstand gives you some viewing-angle options and the body feels sturdy (though it does hold onto fingerprints).

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Gamut tanked thoroughly, dropping to just 61.9% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space -- so much for experiencing the wide color gamut employed by HDR content. Worse still, even brightness and contrast took hits. Both overall screen brightness and 10% window brightness failed to cross even 300 nits, and black levels were elevated to the point of seeing a 707:1 contrast ratio. This makes for miserable HDR viewing. 

Arzopa has a second mode, called HDR 2084, but this one proved even worse. It drops the P3 coverage to 51.1% and raises black levels to 0.5 nits while only hitting a 280.5-nit peak brightness, making for a 610:1 contrast ratio. 

We really like the Arzopa Z1RC for its base features, solid performance for its price and general design. The claims of being able to do more, i.e., 500-nit brightness and HDR, make things sour a bit. If those aren't necessities for you, the Z1RC is a fine high-res 16-inch portable monitor with good color performance and an even better price. 

How we test monitors

Measurements for the Plugable USB-C Portable Monitor (USBC-PDMON) were taken using a Spyder X2 Ultra colorimeter using DataColor's Spyder X2 software for SDR. Color accuracy measurement results are reported in Delta E 1976 using Datacolor's 48-color patch test.

In addition, HDR results were gathered using the VESA DisplayHDR Test app's patterns to display 100% and 10% windows for brightness measurements as well as RGBW values, again measured using the Spyder X2 Ultra, to get CIE xyY color values and compared against the DCI-P3 color space's xyY color values to calculate HDR gamut coverage using this gamut calculator.

On the most basic monitors, we may stick with just brightness, contrast and color gamut, while on more capable displays, we may run tests of most user-selectable modes for gaming or color-critical usage, uniformity and so on. For the color work, we may also run tests to verify how white point accuracy varies with brightness. We also use Blur Busters' motion tests to judge motion artifacts (such as ghosting) or refresh rate-related problems that can affect gaming. 

Keep in mind that individual results can vary from a manufacturer's reported results for a variety of reasons. For instance, you can be using a different set of color patches for the accuracy tests (as I do), a different colorimeter (as most individuals do), a different way of calculating (such as determining gamut using RGB and CMY primaries rather than the more common RGB only), monitor settings (manufacturers rarely provide the OSD settings used for its tests) and so on.