Cheap Mini-LED Monitors Are Taking Over the Market

so here we have three different monitors displaying HDR content I want to have a guess which one of these does not have a mini LED backlight I probably don't even have to tell you that it is the one on the left that uses a conventional backlight with no local dimming at all the other two monitors have a 576 Zone backlight with full array local dimming which of course results in these much deeper blacks and way higher contrast so why do we still use monitors with a conventional backlight at all when something like this exists well monitors with mini LED backlights have been insanely expensive basically just about until now with these monitors hitting the market technically there's also the gp27u and the gp27q by Cooler Master that kind of wear the first mini LED monitors with a reasonable price tag but yeah you might have already noticed that these Cooler Master and the KDC monitors that I have here basically look identical from the outside and that's no coincidence as confirmed by ktc the m27p20 pro is actually identical to The Cooler Master gp20 7u minus the standard view from it weeks though the M27 T20 for now is exclusive to ktc and the gp27q is exclusive to Cooler Master and it turns out ktc is actually the OEM that's behind all of these mini LED monitors from both Cooler Master and ktc themselves so these new much more affordable mini LED monitors can basically all be attributed to ktc which kind of makes me wonder how they can pull this off and if there's a catch I mean this 4k 160hz monitor with a 576 Zone backlight is coming in at just about 800 of course that's still a lot of money don't don't get me wrong but actually roughly the same price as a monitor with a regular backlight and otherwise the same specs and that's pretty impressive and for other mini LED monitors that are somewhat comparable you're looking to spend at least a couple of hundred dollars more if not much more even this only M9 with its just 96 Zone backlight is slightly more expensive than this and the other monitor that I have here comes in at about 500 which is basically unheard of for a mini LED monitors especially with such a high Zone count so both of these monitors actually are pretty cheap for what they are but yeah before we get overly excited let's take a look at how these monitors actually perform because even with a 576 Zone backlight blooming is still a thing even though the Zone count is relatively High a single zone still is much larger than just a few pixels so small objects with high contrast edges still have a relatively bright Halo surrounding them just like you can see here of course these test images are specifically designed so that we can see these exact floors and shortcomings of local dimming displays so that's something to keep in mind with more realistic images the full array logo it doesn't do a much better job and you really have to look out for Blooming it's not something you're gonna notice very often when watching a movie for instance unfortunately though the local dimming feature is pretty much only usable for HDR content consumption or HDR gaming I really wish the local dimming would be usable on the desktop and for regular SDR as well and maybe even for photo editing and stuff like that because having that high contrast all the time would be pretty sweet but this unfortunately isn't really a viable option because as soon as you turn off HDR with local dimming still on things get a bit weird especially the gamma is totally out of control making things look washed out and tones blend into each other so if you want to enjoy local dimming you definitely have to enable HDR as well this mostly fixes the gamma issues and looks quite a bit better even though colors and Gamma still don't look nearly as good as in the SDR mode node without look dimming partially we can blame that two windows with its wonky HDR implementation which makes desktop HDR kinda hard to use and windows really doesn't do a good job in making SDR content look good in HDR mode but regardless even if the HDR implementation was better you probably still wouldn't want to use local dimming on the desktop with all these sharp high contrast edges the limitations of the mini LED technology become pretty clear like a white window on dark background well you're gonna see blooming and the mouse cursor on a dark background not looking great so yeah to be honest this mini LED tag isn't really very useful for anything else than HDR content it's something you gotta turn on for HDR and turn it off otherwise HDR though looks amazing these videos are kind of worst case scenarios for the mini LED tag as they're showing a lot of high contrast edges and small bright details against a super dark background essentially these are made to showcase the benefits of OLED over non-self-emissive panel tag but even under these harsh conditions I'm honestly pretty impressed with how good the overall image looks on both of these monitors I mean sure if you're pixel peeping you can spot the bloom that's surrounding bright highlights pretty easily but that's truly not something that would distract me from enjoying a good HDR movie or HDR video game it's something you kinda actively have to look out for if you're just watching a movie the blooming will very likely go unnoticed and interestingly enough it's much cheaper M27 T20 that shows the least amount of roaming it's almost half the price of the M27 P20 Pro but I actually prefer it for HDR and that's because it's using a VA panel which has a pretty high contrast to begin with so in combination with the local dimming backlight the perceived contrast is a good bit higher than with the mini LED IPS Planner on the right I honestly did not expect such a great HDR representation from a less than 500 monitor by the way KDC advertised both of these monitors as hdr-1000 with 1000 nits of hdrp brightness and with certain winner sizes I measure these monitors actually reaching up to almost 1200 nerds so can you see are even a bit conservative with their marketing here especially the full screen brightness is impressively bright seems like this one from altered Carbon on Netflix really benefit from this the specular highlights in the cyberpunk-like city do look nice but where it gets really impressive is when they break through the clouds it's kinda hard to capture that on camera but the sun in the scene is pretty intense it's so bright that if you're using these monitors in a different room scenes like this will actually make you squinting your eyes now the HDR accuracy was also pretty respectable on both monitors the more expensive m27p20 pro does a better job here but the slight in accuracies in eotf tracking don't really take away much from the actual HDR experience to be honest I do however wish that KDC wouldn't look the RGB Sliders in the HDR mode so that we can actually adjust the color temperature or white Point generally both of these monitors are quite restrictive when it comes to which settings you can adjust in which mode or which modes you can actually combine as soon as I activate HDR for instance large parts of the OSD menu become grayed out on both monitors so you basically can't adjust anything color related in HDR which is annoying to be honest also adaptive sync cannot be used when local dimming is enabled which makes low refresh rate HDR gaming much less enjoyable I mean you surely don't want to turn off local dimming for HDR gaming because that's one of the reasons to get a mini LED monitor in the first place so you basically got to accept screen tearing thanks to the lack of freesync or g-sync in this mode Cooler Master recently tackled this and a few others more quirks with a firmware update on their mini LED monitors that are being made by ktc and Khaleesi told me that they are planning to release an update firmware for their monitors as well so I hope this will be resolved soon now outside of HDR adapter sync works as it should without flickering or any other defects even the M27 T20 with its VA panel doesn't show any flickering even when being stress tested that's great to see especially as VA panels often have issues with this however activating the freesync g-sync setting in the OSD menu adds a few milliseconds of lag which is a bit weird the M27 P20 Pro don't have this issue and neither of them adds any perceivable lag in HDR mode so except for the Adaptive sync mode on the m201720 both monitors actually have a very low lag generally both of these monitors are very capable for regular FPS gaming the M27 P20 Pro actually has a very fast IPS panel it's basically among the fastest you can expect from IPS buttons these days so it's a very capable monitor even for more competitive games giving your PC can reach good frame rates in this resolution naturally the ipanners struggle a bit more with response times especially when it comes to dark tones though the M27 T20 is one of the quicker VA monitors you can get these days not quite at the level of the fastest vas like the aocpd27 or Samsung G7 but it's pretty fast nevertheless now you might have noticed that I showed the results for 144hz here even though the M27 T20 is advertised as a 165hz gaming monitor weirdly enough 165 Hertz is only possible with HDR set to off in the monitors menu as soon as we're setting HDR to Auto even if the monitor isn't even connected to an HDR source 144hz is the highest it'll go manually switching HDR between off and auto is pretty annoying so personally I just leave hdr on auto all the time with a monitor like this you're probably going to be using HDR a lot so I think it's the most practical to just see this as a 144hz monitor 144 and 165 Hertz are too close to make a noticeable difference anyway but in case you're curious here are the response time numbers for both refresh rates and comparison and yeah guess what the M27 P20 Pro is also kept at 144hz in certain scenarios here though the HDR Auto setting isn't an issue it runs at 160hz no problem but you cannot use adaptive sync above 144hz all of this is pretty confusing and I honestly think at this point KDC could have just made both monitors max out at 144hz no matter what and call it a day it really doesn't add much value to get a few words more with some specific settings but it makes things a whole lot more confusing generally that's one of the biggest issues with these monitors they are a bit quirky so is it all worth it I mean when it comes to HDR these two are really hard to beat especially the M27 T20 with its VA panel is probably the best HDR monitor you're gonna find at this price point personally I haven't seen anything that comes even close for about 500 despite that I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed when using these monitors for the first time I initially thought that I could make use of the mini LED backlight all the time and not just for HDR so so naturally I was a bit disappointed when I saw how badly the local dimming works on the desktop but I've now realized that I got to view these monitors as play normal IPS and VA monitors for desktop usage and for FPS gaming and stuff like that and only hdrs were the mini LED part comes into play Whenever you watch an HDR movie or play an HDR game turning on local dimming will get you an HDR image that you just wouldn't get from a monitor with a normal backlight the rest of the time these basically are pretty good normal backlight monitors they have a few quirks when it comes to adapter sync and also some annoying settings restrictions you gotta get around but I guess that are a few minor annoyances we gonna accept for now as there just aren't any mini LED Alternatives with a similar feature set other than these ktc monitors and those that are made by ktc now my usual color accuracy measurements didn't really fit into the video this time so I made them available as a public post robot in my patreon link is in the video description and you don't need to be a patreon supporter to see this post it's totally free for everyone you also find the recommended settings and ICC profile over there thanks for watching with some listen video

Channel: techless

Views: 182,438

Keywords: gaming monitor, mini-led monitor, 144 hz, 165 hz, KTC, FALD

Id: xINKVAGOiAs

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023