Review on Sceptre C325B QWD168: FreeSync Adjustable DisplayPort with Height Adjustment, Blue Light Filter, Built-In Speakers and LED by Jonathan Cardenas

This monitor is near perfect. It's bright (420 nits), rich colors, crystal clear text, you can run it at 1440p 165Hz in YCbCr444 10-bit HDR with a DisplayPort 1.4 cable, it's adjustable height, tilt, swivel, matte finish with no reflections, decent angle checking (for a VA panel), AMD FreeSync (also works with G-Sync), built-in overclocking, pretty much everything you could want in a monitor at a very reasonable price. But it has one fatal flaw and that is that it will never enter sleep/standby mode! My computer is set to turn off the monitors after 15 minutes and after 15 minutes the screen goes black but the backlight never turns off. The screen is still lit, so the LED backlight is still on. I've tried everything I can think of including different cables, enabling the "Auto-Off" feature in the monitor's menu so that it turns itself off instead of relying on Windows to send a sleep signal, different power settings in Windows, but it doesn't matter That I just never switch off completely. This may not bother some people, but let me explain why this is so bad. When the LED backlight is on 24/7 it uses a lot more power (50W vs 0.2W in standby) and when it's running 24/7 instead of the usual 8 on/16 off it means that it consumes 290 kW more energy. In the year. And at an average electricity rate of $0.11 per kWh, $110 of electricity is wasted annually. This makes this monitor MUCH more expensive in the long run. It also shortens the life of the monitor as LEDs only last around 30,000 hours. With the LED backlight on 24/7, the lifespan is only 3.4 years before the LED burns out, compared to over 10 years when only operated 8 hours a day. So if you own this monitor for 10 years, you spend $1,110 extra on electricity and need to replace it every 3.5 years at $350 each = $1,800 additional running cost over 10 years. I have contacted Specter Technical Support regarding this issue but have not yet received a response. I will update my review when I do. But I think it's just a design flaw in the monitor's firmware as I've seen several people mention the same issue in the Questions and Answers section.