Buy OLED Now or Wait? Does 10-bit Matter? - February Q&A

welcome back to monitors unboxed for another q a session this time for February 2023 you guys asked another great range of questions this month between our Discord Community for Hardware unbox supporters and also the YouTube Community tab so we'll be able to get to all of them in this particular video we'll get to a lot of the good ones a lot of the upvoted ones and also you know often some of you guys do ask for various different testing or guides or things like that which hopefully I'll be getting to in upcoming videos speaking of guides today's video is sponsored by scribe the free browser extension for Chrome that allows you to easily Auto generate step-by-step guides with just a click of a button let's say for example that I wanted to create a guide showing our patreon members how to access our monitor OSD settings all I need to do is install the extension click on the Scribe icon in Chrome and start recording then I navigate through our post to find the link and how to search for your monitor in our spreadsheet after saving the recording the Scribe automatically generates a step-by-step guide complete with screenshots and the actions I took a few bits of editing to add in more information for our users and it's complete ready to share it's that easy with the Scribe extension and while the free version will be just fine for most of you scribe Pro even extends this functionality to support desktop app recording and screenshot customization if you're interested in trying out scribe for free click our Link in the description below it's really that easy alright let's get to the first question with so many new OLED monitors on the horizon do you think it's worth investing into one now or maybe waiting until the back half of the year to see what the market brings this is a really good question because obviously at the moment we've seen new OLED monitors hit the market we've got the Alienware one from last year and of course now the LG 27 inch 1440p monitor which I think will be the sort of main toss-up between people who are wanting all their technology to beat their next gaming Monitor and likely to have a comparison of those two products on this very Channel right now I think though for a lot of people who are considering OLED in a sort of maybe on the fence or wanting to assess whether they should jump in right now I reckon waiting at least a couple of months is probably the way to go at the moment and I say that because there are a number of other monitors that will be using very similar panels coming to Market shortly so on the Alienware cutie OLED side we're expecting to see a Samsung equivalent the jet OLED which is available actually in a number of countries right now I believe it's coming to Australia in March so that's probably around when we'll be able to test it but that is another product that is slowly rolling out worldwide and then we have the MSI equivalent as well so I believe there's I believe there's more versions than that I think I've seen a Phillips one but maybe some other versions there too but certainly if you are interested in the Alienware monitor either the DW or the DWF and you sort of maybe you didn't like one aspect of performance or had a nitpick about that particular product there is a chance that if you wait a little bit you'll be able to find something that may be more suited to you in the Samsung monitor MSI monitor or other variants and the same thing does apply to the LG model as well we've seen monitors announced from Asus Acer and a few others that are expected to use the very same panel now with all of these cases whether we're talking Cudi OLED or the LG W OLED panels we're not expecting the fundamentals of those panels to change significantly so things like response times color gamut those aspects will be very similar between the different variants that are available to you but certainly later in this year you will have a better variety of monitors that may cater a bit better to exactly what you're after and maybe we'll see some price Wars as well I'm not sure how much of a battle they'll be able to get into on pricing because obviously monitor pricing is dictated largely by the cost of the panel itself which will be a fixed cost between all the manufacturers but you know maybe we'll see a few discounts prices get a bit lower because there will be more options available for people so I guess that's generally what I would be thinking of whether you wanted to buy OLED now or later however I wouldn't be expecting any major changes to the panel formats that we've seen we have seen some announcements of a few different types of ultra wides and things like that but if you're wanting a for example 27 inch 4K OLED or 32 inch OLED monitor it doesn't really sound like that sort of option is on the cards at least this year so yeah it'll be more around am I satisfied with the monitors are on the market today with these panels or should I be waiting seeing if there's pricing differences or maybe some other differences between the options using the same panel would better cooling of an OLED display for example with more airflow chilled air or mods bring higher brightness for large areas or as the firmware usually so locked down that it doesn't matter yeah interesting question obviously all that brightness is a a big talking point these days if we're talking about Hardware design side of things in terms of adding heatsinks to OLED monitors we have seen that that does increase the brightness capabilities of certain panels or TVs we've generally seen that the panels that do include those sorts of features have higher brightness it tends to be more limited to small window size brightness so for example a monitor that has no cooling versus a monitor that has cooling like a heatsink for example so you know it may be able to get 200 nits brighter in the circumstance where we do have those cooling capabilities but of course this is a hardware thing that has to be built into the Monitor and something that you specifically look out for when you purchase it we've seen in our own testing that a product like the Asus pg42 uq which does claim to have additional cooling capabilities compared to LG's own C2 TVs does indeed have higher brightness than the C2 in some circumstances but certainly for full screen brightness that tends to be fairly similar between the monitors and TVs and things that at least I've seen whether or not they have cooling or no cooling or at least improved cooling versus standard cooling so from that side of things I don't expect that will change significantly unfortunately it's more things like w OLED versus cutie all lead that gives us big differences in terms of full screen brightness as far as you yourself as an end user taking an existing Monitor and trying to cool it better yourself I haven't seen any evidence that that would significantly improve the performance of a product most of the time the brightness capabilities and brightness tracking of monitors is hard coded into the firmware and we even see evidence of that just without looking at cooling at all because some monitors the LG 27gr 95qe that we just tested is one example where full screen SDR brightness is actually quite a lot higher than the full screen HDR brightness now there's no reason that the HDR performance couldn't be brighter for full screen images that's just a simple firmware difference it's got nothing to do with the cooling capability use of the monitor because under the same temperature you can very much get higher brightness in the SDR mode so a lot of those brightness things are very much firmware limitations and it does seem like manufacturers that are integrating these panels again they all typically come from the same manufacturer while they can tweak things slightly depending on the hardware and capabilities that they've got in their product they are still largely limited by overall design guidelines so for example again that pg42 uq despite having that enhanced cooling capabilities it doesn't have much higher full screen brightness than the other monitors that we've seen that use OLED technology so yeah I don't expect that buyers buying OLED monitors will be able to add fans or major heatsinks and expect to see immediate performance improvements this isn't like a processor or graphics card where potentially you're able to just you know Chuck in a better cooler it's not thermal throttling anymore you can get better performance it does seem to be more of a firmware thing I'm not ruling out that there are some firmware hidden menus that you can use to change things I haven't really looked into that side of things I guess that's more of an overclocking thing but certainly I would expect that the off-the-shelf performance that you see from an OLED will be the same regardless of whether you're chewing it or whether it's run under normal conditions the one downside of my monitor specs is that it can't do 10-bit color at its highest refresh rate how big of a downgrade do you feel 8-bit color is and where would you even notice it so yeah this is one where I I honestly don't think the difference between 10 bit and 8-bit is all that significant most monitors these days in their 10-bit mode will still be using an 8-bit native panel and then be using FRC or dithering techniques to improve that to 10 bit there are some monitors that do have the native 10-bit performance all of a lot of the time those professional monitors I think some of the new OLED monitors do have true 10-bit capabilities as well but for the vast majority of 10-bit gaming displays that we see the actual 10-bit mode is still mostly 8-bit and honestly I don't think for most circumstances that there's a significant visual difference between 8 and 10 bits certainly not for most gaming and content creation content consumption circumstances and use cases it really doesn't look very different the main differences that we see with 10-bit are things like improved gradient handling that's really where higher bit depths tend to benefit monitors you get smoother handling of gradients but all the time time these days even 8-bit monitors can use dithering without running in their 10-bit mode anyway so side by side you may be running in a monitor in its 8-bit mode and then in its 10-bit mode and even for things like gradients the two modes will look very similar So based on that I don't really think this is too much of a concern certainly ideally you'd want to run the monitoring it's 10-bit mode for those edge cases where 10-bit may give you an advantage for things like gradients but for Content consumption and watching movies playing games you don't see gradients that often it's tends to be a brief scene where you may see like the sky in a gradient or things like that where there may be that that benefit and also depends on the content that you're actually watching as well whether that's true 10-bit content HDR does tend to be 10 bit or even 12-bit games as well what sort of settings they're using how they're processing colors and things like that so yeah for General content consumption I don't think the difference matters that much where it may matter more is for people who are using it for content creation where gradients things like that you do need the most accurate representation of what those things will look like especially if something is going out to be printed you wouldn't want to see something on your display that has an ugly gradient or effect of a low bit depth when the actual printer and printing process will mean that that artifact isn't there or maybe you accidentally make something that has a gradient that doesn't look great and then you're not really sure whether it's your display or how it look when it's printed those are all the considerations as a creator that you'd want that additional bit depth and why a lot of monitors that are creative focused and professional focused will have that increased bit depth but again yeah not something I'd be super concerned with I would typically just recommend running your monitor in 8-bit if you can't run it at the 10-bit capabilities at the maximum refresh rate don't think it makes too much of a difference will fald monitors have a benefit in desktop and SDR use or is it only useful for HDR so many reviews I've seen on fald monitors say to disable local dimming outside of HDR but being able to to get better contrast without going OLED it seems very useful for SDR consumption and creation this is a difficult one because it really depends on the type of monitor that you've got and the technology how many dimming zones and all that as to how useful full array local dimming is for SDR and desktop content I think if we're talking about SDR content consumption so for example watching Str videos or playing games in the Str mode generally I think that you can enable FLD in those circumstances because often you're not really going to be seeing a hard gradient you know hard edges to apps you're not going to be seeing large areas of uniform colors text is less likely especially while watching videos and all those things look great on FLD it's basically the same as as HDR right like HDR we know the benefits there for Content consumption watching videos playing games you can do the same thing in SDR with FLD on and get a good enhanced contrast experience you won't benefit as much because SDR does have a different gamma curve eotf curve which means that there's not as much data allocated to the data Shades which means that for SDR you know the FLD backlight isn't going to be doing as much there's not going to be as much usage of Shadow content and Shadow detail so the benefits there will be limited compared to running in the HDR mode but definitely there will be a benefit there for having that feature enabled why I generally recommend people disable fold for desktop use it comes down to a couple of things the the primary one is productivity apps or desktop apps often what you see with an FLD screen when viewing a desktop application is that your cursor text things like that edges of content will have haloing or quite bright sort of rings around certain parts of the content so for example if we're looking at I think one of the things that's really obvious to me is the steam user interface on some monitors with FLD because it's the steam interface is sort of that dark gray shade FLD is active the backlights are dimming down a little bit to you know enhance the contrast for that scene but then as you're moving the cursor around or viewing some of the text elements or clicking on things you will see that halo around the cursor or other objects which I think looks pretty ugly and this can also rear its head in Creator applications things like Photoshop for example again that app uses a gray background generally speaking is quite a dark interface and then as you're moving things around the screen as you're maybe working on the image in that workflow you might see haloing around this sort of harsh Edge between the content you're working on and the interface so from my perspective I think for desktop apps definitely FLD disabled tends to look the best gives you the most uniform experience which is better for those productivity apps web browsing and Creator applications but again if you're you know if you're using content consumption as your primary focus for SDR then you can probably leave it enabled I also think the benefit of having FLD disabled for SDR but enabled for HDR allows you to separate those two use cases a little bit better between desktop apps and content consumption for example you could still use the HDR mode in Windows to run your SDR content for example videos is one example and rely on tone mapping to get the best experience with FLD enabled and then switch to the SDR mode where FLD is disabled for your productivity apps and things where you may see those Halos becoming more obvious for things like again Photoshop web browsers things like that and I tend to find that works as sort of the best combination on those monitors HR mode for Content consumption including SDR apps and then ate the SDR mode for your desktop apps so yeah that tends to be the way I I look at things certainly all that does give you an advantage there and that you don't really have to worry about that sort of thing but yeah FLD does give you that Advantage for Content consumption I'd recommend keeping it on in those circumstances why aren't there more 16 by 10 aspect ratio high-end gaming monitors it works great for all types of content productivity and gaming if there were all that options in this aspect ratio the small black bars would be even less of an issue yeah this is a great question and it's something that I don't really understand um well I guess there's a couple of perspectives as to why a monitor manufacturer wouldn't prioritize a 16 by 10 aspect ratio Monitor and I imagine a large portion of that is that buyers are preferring 16x9 aspect ratios or other formats so if your majority of buyers are going hey I'm fine with my 27 and 16x9 monitor 32 inch 16x9 that you know the the most common formats for gaming monitors then there's no real incentive or no significant incentive to experiment with that slightly extended 16 by 10 aspect ratio despite it being super popular quite a while ago so I imagine that you know when we're talking about monitors which again some panels aren't shipped in significant volumes there are lots of panels that are fairly Niche products and Niche use cases that don't sell heaps you know to then make another format that's maybe even more Niche it may not justify the engineering and design costs to make that sort of product that's where I imagine a lot of the 1610 discussion comes from obviously the reason we moved away from 16 10 to 16 9 is the preferred format for desktop use was that that was the emerging format at the time for video content so with a lot of you know people using monitors for watching videos or working in that sort of sort of area or playing games and you know you want that sort of standard size format 16x9 became the preferred method 16x10 unfortunately died away a little bit I think it is a great format I'd love to see more monitor manufacturers experiment with sort of that taller monitor even if it is for gaming obviously we've got plenty of options for width you can go from 16 9 21 9 32 9 really crazy formats these days if you want to go that Ultra wide and immersive format but yeah if you're someone that uses your monitor that's more bounce between gaming and content creation or productivity apps then 16x10 does make more sense so hopefully we do see a few more of those monitors come back into fashion over time it will become more of sort of an experimenting thing you release one monitor you see what's the sort of reception for 16 by 10 versus 16 by 9 sort of similar specs and capabilities see how they sell unfortunately if 16x10 doesn't sell super well then maybe they won't go with that there's other considerations as well like the you know the mother glass that they use to produce a lot of displays these days maybe cutting it down to a 16 by 10 aspect ratio isn't as economical as 16x9 or it isn't as well designed for 16 by 10 so yeah there's many reasons why why they may not decide to do that at the moment but like I said I think more experimenting with different display formats is only a good thing and something I'd like to see happen more next question why do monitor prices and models in general have a slower refresh cycle than other PC components while monitor is also the most diverse in terms of option and configuration yeah I mean I think the basis of this question is definitely true in terms of we don't see as much advancement as quickly on the monitor side as we see from CPUs and gpus gpus as one example we've seen quite significant performance improvements in just a couple of years you know 50 more performance are doubling of performance whereas on the monitor side it's obviously a much slower burn to get faster response times new resolutions HDR capabilities yeah it takes a lot longer to develop those sorts of features I think the main reason why we see this perhaps the most obvious reason is really the development cycles of the panels themselves a lot of the time you know what we're seeing from monitors is dictated by those panel manufacturers and a lot of the formats and things that we see at the moment have been very similar for some time now if we're talking about 4K monitors as one example that has obviously been a format that's available for some time and for eight like let's say we're moving to eight K as one example there's not a huge incentive at the moment to transition to 8K is not as much content it's very demanding on hardware for gaming as one one standpoint and the market for a product like an 8K gaming monitor is probably not there at the moment things like refresh rates have been increasing steadily over time you know I guess a decade ago we were just seeing the introduction of high refresh rate monitors at the time so 120 144 Hertz these days we're seeing 240 hertz 360 Hertz 540 Hertz so in the space of a decade it certainly refresh rates have increased substantially we've seen the introduction of older technology and things like that but yeah once a new technology has been introduced to the market it does take a while for those additional features to come out I expect part of this as well comes down to the monitor Market in general as well so for example a lot of the new technologies the exciting things that we see typically debut in the high end and high-end monitors are not a huge volume category they're certainly not as sold not they don't see the volume of sales that you might see from high-end TVs or certainly expensive to TVs compared to monitors you know old LED TVs even though they cost two thousand dollars with you know fifteen hundred two thousand dollars those typically sell quite a lot more than you would see from a one thousand dollar gaming monitor which is of course a higher category for gaming monitors so when you're talking about a more niche market for you know the new Cutting Edge Technologies that's tend to going to slow the pace a little bit for those advancements because there's not as many people buying they can't invest as much money into that sort of manufacturing and generally monitors tend to get you know sort of the it's not really the scraps or the off cuts of other types of panel manufacturing but certainly it's a lesser priority so all those things you know we've seen HDR is one example of an area that has been very slow to develop for desktop formats as opposed to TVs where that was introduced much earlier and again I imagine a lot of that is because economies of scale the amount of people that could afford 1500 200 1500 2 000 gaming monitors with true HDR capabilities may not have Justified the advancements there until some of those cost challenges are solved that said I do think that the the cost side of things in terms of technology is getting cheaper I think the pace of those sorts of things has been reasonably good we've seen products like 1440p 165 Hertz come down from 500 for good performance I would say about four years ago and nowadays you can get that for half the price at a very similar sort of level of performance So within four to five years getting those Technologies significantly cheaper I think is good improvements that are probably on Pace with what we see in sort of the component side of things but on top of that you know one aspect is simply that a lot of people don't consider upgrading their monitors for five six seven years in a lot of cases so again you know the incentive there for monitor manufacturers to exceed that sort of pace isn't really there if people are settled into that cycle of yeah I'm gonna upgrade my monitor every five years I was on the GPU side people may be upgrading every two or three years and you know just different markets where people are used to different things although DSE is convenient to achieve High resolutions and refresh rates it introduces many issues like not supporting long or low quality cables has issues with kvms and with Nvidia you actually lose features such as DSR and DL DSR many buyers fall into the pitfall of buying monitors that rely on DSC and will only discover some of those issues after the purchase to make matters worse it might not be clear for the average Joe what's happening shouldn't monitor Brands explicitly and clearly explain when DSC is used and what that means for the experience shouldn't this be added to your final table checklist when Brands don't disclose it requires DSC as dodgy advertising by emission so yeah suddenly get the frustration with people that have bought DSC monitors and they can't use it for a variety of reasons or you know they have issues with things like cables and losing features but I don't think this is necessarily dodgy advertising DSC is a part of the HDMI and DisplayPort specifications like many other features so for example DSC is a feature like variable refresh rate or Auto low latency mode for things like HDMI 2.1 so unfortunately with the way these specifications are laid out it's not mandatory to support all of the features but certainly those features are part of it and you know monitor Brands can choose to use that quite fairly so I would expect that any display device that says that it supports a certain technology for example it is display output supporting HDMI 2.1 that that should be capable of all of the features if required by a monitor so that would include DSE that would include variable refresh rates that would include Auto low latency mode I think those are all sort of Baseline expectations and features and this applies to you know basically every sort of product a KVM that was advertising DisplayPort 1.4 functionality or 1.4 a or 2.0 or HDMI 2.1 KVM I'm not sure whichever one of those things applies to that particular device that it should probably be supporting DSC technology because DSC is part of the spec so if it's an HDMI 2.1 advertised product that doesn't act actively or accurately work with DSC then that's a failure of that product it's not so much an issue with the monitor because the monitor is just using an aspect of the specification that is valid and useful for those particular products again yeah it would be handy for monitor manufacturers to go more in depth on the specifications that they offer the various different features from HDMI or DisplayPort that they are supporting again it would be useful to see things like whether vro is supported for HDMI because that benefits console users you know there's many different specifications that will be very useful for monitor Brands to include but I think DSC is one of the ones that is probably less relevant and useful as far as the Nvidia side of things with DSR and DL DSR again that's not a problem with the monitor that is a problem with Nvidia gpus not supporting DSC and those features simultaneously and that's something that Nvidia will need to work around and figure out a way to get those features working again I think DSC is a perfectly valid form of connectivity for high refresh rate monitors if Nvidia is saying hey we support DSC monitors and then saying oh well we don't support DSR and DL DSR then it's really on their DSC implementation how they're working those features as to whether or not you know they can claim that they've got full DSE support if it's actually restricting other forms of functionality so yeah I think the the main concern that I would see from DSC that is on the monitor side of things is more things like cable quality and Cable support if a monitor is using DSC and that requires a high quality cable that's probably something the monitor manufacturers should provide and maybe people need to be a bit more aware of cable quality for high bit rates and things like DSC capabilities but yeah like I said I think it's it's it is a function of display connectivity these days I expect it's only going to get more used as displays increase in resolution and refresh rate we'll see more and more DSC products so having all these additional you know devices that connect to things supporting or not supporting DSC is yeah not great and they really should be integrating that support for example one of the products you know that we talk about frequently in monitor reviews is the PlayStation 5 supporting HDMI 2.1 does it support you know it doesn't work well in the 24 gigabits per second monitors or do you need the 48 gigabits per second monitors the only reason why that's any consideration is that the PlayStation 5 doesn't support DSC if it did support DSC over HDMI 2.1 then those monitors will be 24 gigabits per second ports that Royal and DSC would be a complete non-issue and I guess in my perspective why I would still you know you need to be recommending to customers the products that makes sense for those use cases so if that is a limitation for them then maybe you know a monitor that is better suited to the PlayStation 5's capabilities makes more sense to buy but certainly the issue is more on the side of the PlayStation is on the monitors if they had enabled that HDMI feature like they probably should have then it would work across a much wider variety of displays so yeah I guess it's my opinion on DSC probably should be talked about and advertised again probably be useful to see things like a switch into OST settings but I don't think it's a significant issue for most people and as I said it's it's a correct and valid way of using the specifications for connectivity that we have today I really want to buy an OLED display given all the improvements that have been made for this technology however I'm also a programmer and stare at text a lot I'm scared of all the problems that prevent those monitors from being recommended as productivity devices should I give up and opt for IPs or are those concerns exaggerated yeah I hope you see there's a lot of discussion about all lead tech these days and it's usefulness for desktop apps and productivity the main concerns being burning and the sub pixel layout um I certainly don't think those concerns are exaggerated for productivity apps there has been evidence of people using OLED monitors mainly W OLED but you know we're starting to see a few things with cutie all that as well of if you do the things that are not recommended like viewing static content for long periods of time then those areas that are static for long periods of time will will burn in on the on those monitors and there's certainly been plenty of examples of people that have achieved that with their all their displays for productivity I think Linus Tech tips in his video is probably one of the more High prom high profile examples of that happening so it certainly can happen um so I don't think that yeah I don't think it's exaggerated but it really depends on your use case as to how much of a concern that should be I think the sub pixel layout issue well it's not ideal for text rendering it doesn't look as good as an IPS you know if you are looking at text all day and a lot of the time you probably will get used to what it looks like so if you really want the extra benefits of OLED such as its black levels and HDR performance if you're using it for gaming as well then you know you probably can get away with the subpixel text issues it's not going to make text unreadable so for your programming work it's not going to be a situation where you can't read the code that you're writing it will just mean that it's a little bit blurry it's a little bit less crisp maybe it'll limit how small you can make the text compared to something on IPS because of the crispness and Clarity of the image but yeah I don't I don't expect that will be a significant factor it's more just a downside and something that you may consider going IPS versus OLED for that use case I really think the biggest issue for this is burn in if you are a programmer that's sitting at your OLED screen for like eight hours a day where you just got one application open or maybe a couple of applications that are generally the same applications like your programming workflow maybe a web browsing application yeah I would expect there's a there's a risk there of that burning in over time and it's probably a reason why I wouldn't recommend someone programming uh using an OLED display then again I know a lot of our programmers do prefer dark mode as a way to program where you know the main interface is black or largely black and then the text is bright I think that's significantly less likely to burn in so if that's your use case if you're a programmer that uses dark mode or uses a dark interface and you're combining that with other apps that are generally used in dark mode and you enable all of the screen protection features pixel shifting and all that sort of stuff then I do believe that you it'll burn in less or it will take a longer time to burn in I just don't want to sit here and say it definitely won't burn in or it'll take a really long time to burn in or something like that I just don't really have the data or evidence to know one way or another on that so yeah if I was a programmer I'd probably steer clear as much as possible from from OLED and probably still prefer LCDs for that use case but then again if you're you're programming use cases a sort of split 50 50 with gaming and content consumption or even more towards gaming and content consumption then the OLED may make sense it also will make sense if you can afford to replace your OLED quite a lot things like the Alienware monitor do come with a three year burn-in warranty so that's a consideration as well if you know supposedly if you used it for programming workloads and there was burn-in then you should be able to get a replacement by that warranty of course for three years you'd have to be comfortable with you know that only lasting for three years but definitely I would say that that's one consideration that you can still go with OLED again you will have to consider things like glossy screen Coatings versus Matt and Watts better for your use case a lot of oleds do come with glossy finishes which may not be as suitable for use during daytime applications there's certainly a lot of there's a lot of considerations there but I think think my general recommendation for someone being a programmer especially someone whose full-time job is a programmer doing that sort of work eight hours a day would be to stick with an LCD have pixel response times on LCDs improved dramatically in the last few years yeah this is an interesting question and it sort of prompted me to go back and have a look at the historic data that I've captured for response times on monitors since at least we have introduced this newest set of testing methodology that we're using at the moment so it was a very interesting question because I think we sort of saw a jump in performance around the time that the LG 27 gl850 came out so the the first of those Nano IPS one millisecond greater great IPS monitors sort of pushed ahead IPS technology a bit in that front and that monitor was released I believe it was 2019 uh don't quote me on that don't don't quite remember off the top I had it was definitely 2019 or maybe late 2018 either way that monitor sort of that was sort of the shift that we saw big shift in LCD performance and there were a couple of monitors priced that some TN monitors and and so forth that did have improved performance but certainly that shifted you know IPS forward a bit so since 2019 so that would sort of count the last couple of years like the question has been asked I've tested around 100 monitors using my latest test methodology and looking at this scanner plot you can see that there is a trend for best performance so best greater great performance so that's running the monitor in the best overdrive setting at the highest refresh rate that there is a general Trend down in terms of response time performance across the monitors that I've tested now this data could be biased a little bit by the fact that it's only the monitors I've tested so over time you know I have preferred to look at monitors that I think are the most interesting which may be more high-end products maybe cutting out some of those slower VA monitors over time from the monitors that we have tested but generally over time the interesting high-end highly recommended products that we've tested on the channel and we tend to cover at least what I think is most of the the really good products that you should be considering would you see that downward Trend however this is sort of looking at all monitors so when we look at all the monitors we've tested there is a downward Trend but if we look at the best performing characters from this group down the bottom of the the scatter plot which is the the lowest response time monitors it's been relatively flat you know we've seen the Samsung Odyssey G7 come out with its VA panel and that did have quite good response times for Peak Performance and response times for LCDs have been relatively similar to that since then all the future VA monitors from the Samsung Auto C line I've had very similar response time performance we have seen a couple of really fast ips's come out pg27 aqn is one example that is sort of pushed IPS a little bit further but hasn't broken through that established Baseline VA barrier from those Odyssey monitors significantly it is a fast monitor it definitely performs very well in our charts but yeah it feels like the best of the best LCD products that certainly since 2020 or thereabouts the performance has been fairly similar but it is still good to see that overall trend of monitor performance getting faster over time so your general monitor that you'll be buying you could expect over the last four years or so to be faster this also is applied to you average cumulative deviation so this isn't just the highest refresh rate best response time setting giving you that sort of performance improvement over time into the entire average performance of the monitor including low refresh rates because of course one way to cheat would just be to optimize performance for higher refresh rates and completely throw out performance for the lower refresh rates which tends to be an issue with LCDs the faster you make those higher refresh rates the worse overshoot you get at the lower refresh rates but the cumulative deviation numbers that we have do suggest that that's not really what's happening it's not just pushing speed up at the high end and letting the low and performance get worse it is a general trend of monitor performance getting better cumulative deviation has been getting lower over time which is a positive trend to see and a good Trend to see it hasn't the trend line isn't as aggressive as what we see on the other side of things the response time side of things not you could really call that chart an aggressive trend line but it hasn't been as I guess steep of an improvement but again it does show at least based on the monitors that we've tested that there has been an improvement in performance over time and I would expect that Trend to continue as we see the introduction of new monitors targeting 1440p 360 Hertz we've got 1080p 500 Hertz coming out this year as well All Leads were not included in these charts obviously that is going to incentivize LCD manufacturers to improve performance further as oleds get more and more prevalent for gaming and high performance monitors so yeah I don't think I would describe it as a drastic improvement or drastic performance improvements but it is still good to verify that they have genuinely been performance improvements over the last few years so that about does it for the monitors unbox q a for February really appreciate all of you guys that submitted questions for this video as always there were far too many questions to get to in the one video but I always appreciate people that support the channel whether that's asking questions subscribing to the channel liking videos I've even seen some super thanks for our recent reviews really appreciate that if you were some of the people that that did do that so yeah I guess that's it thanks for watching do consider supporting us via patreon or float plate links in the description below for access to things like our monthly live stream that we just did you can watch a replay of that if you're interested we've got our Discord Community as well if you want to chat about monitors so yeah that's it thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Monitors Unboxed

Views: 135,614

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Id: BfxXl0r_6T0

Length: 38min 8sec (2288 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023