Cheap vs Expensive Monitor - Same Specs Different Price

one of these monitors costs about twice as much as the other one the specs of these two though are almost identical both of them sport a 27 inch ips panel the one on the left has a 1440p or qhd panel and so does the one on the right the only difference in terms of specs is that the much more expensive acer comes with a refresh rate of 170hz which is a mere 5 hertz more than the much cheaper msi has so naturally i'm curious to find out whether or not there are any meaningful differences beyond these specs especially if there's anything that would justify spending roughly twice as much on a monitor that has essentially the same core specs or maybe it turns out that premium monitors in the end are just marketing bs [Music] 550 us for a 1440p monitor feels a bit like a flashback from like six years ago back when this was a good price for a 144 ish hertz ips with that size and resolution but this is what acer today won for the xb27 3u monitor and acer are not alone in fact most other brands offer very similar monitors for a similar price as well now representative for this class of monitors we'll be checking out this exact model from acer and i'm 100 not gonna read out all these numbers and letters but safe to say that you're getting a lot of letters for your money the msi g273qf on the other hand has a much lower character count and what's much more important a lower price 290 dollars us at the time of making this video is almost half of what the acer goes for now that price difference might have you thinking that the msi must be insanely bad but i recently did a full review of the g273 and can tell you for sure that it's a very good monitor in fact so what can the acer do that the msi can't for starters it comes with a beefy height adjustable stand whereas the msi has a basic tilt only stand but a decent monitor arm is like 20 to 30 bucks or so so the standalone certainly does not justify a 260 dollar price difference neither does the rgb strip on the back which is a feature most cheaper monitors don't have this rgb implementation from acer though i have to admit is some of the most useful i've seen so far because besides the usual color and light effects this can also function as a pretty beefy bias light with either a warm cool or more neutral tone which honestly is a pretty neat feature but again at about 20 to the price of the msi for an led strip and you can have more or less the same experience without needing to buy an expensive monitor a feature that is much harder to recreate though is the ambient light sensor that only the expensive monitor has it's supposed to change the display's brightness to the best setting for the current ambient light with some tinkering this would also be possible on most other monitors but a diy solution very likely would not look as slick as a built-in ambient light sensor and this really is a feature we don't typically find on cheaper monitors now a caveat with the xb273u specifically is that the ambient light sensor doesn't really work how it's intended to i can get it to adjust the brightness down but for some strange reason the sensor refuses to turn the brightness back up no matter what lights i pointed it so while this generally is a great feature and i also have tested a monitor that has a properly working ambient light sensor in my experience many implementations are straight up bad buggy or don't even really work at all that's definitely something to keep in mind if you're planning to spend extra for a monitor that has an ambient light sensor now so far we haven't really found much that could really justify buying a premium monitor like the acer besides a few more or less useful features but having a look at the displays might actually change that i mean the display certainly is the most essential component of a monitor and should make up for a big part of a monitor's retail price so the much more expensive monitor might have a significantly better picture quality faster response times better color accuracy and things like that at least this is how it should be at first glance side by side the cheaper msi on the left doesn't really look that different though taking a closer look literally these two panels look almost identical as well though their respective factory menus tell us that they each use a different panel despite looking so similar now i did some digging but it's hard to find the exact prices for these panels from what i was able to gather the panel of the acer likely is about 20 to 30 percent more expensive than the one used in the cheaper msi that's still far off from the actual price difference between these monitors though of course that doesn't really matter the slightly more expensive panel is just way better in terms of response times that's certainly not the case both monitors in their respective best modes look pretty much identical and that's exactly the impression that i got from gaming on them side by side besides the fact that it's incredibly distracting to have the game running on both screens simultaneously i couldn't perceive any difference when it comes to response times smearing or even input lag i surely wouldn't guess that there was such a drastic price difference between these two from gaming honestly these two are both great and i'd be equally happy playing my first person shooters on either one i also spent some time testing their respective shadow boost modes and you can see them side by side with the strongest boost applied they obviously have a bit of a different approach when it comes to which tones to boost how much but i found that both modes generally do what they are supposed to do i personally don't have a strong preference for either one so you'll be the judge both also sport a backlight strobing mode and here things get worse for the acer which one would you think is the more expensive monitor well the image on the left that looks way better actually belongs to the cheaper msi this does not only show sharper image but it has less red fringing and the msi even gets brighter in its backlight strobing mode so that's a straight up loss for the expensive monitor by the way if you like those ufo photos the photos for all the other refresh rates and modes that didn't make it into this video will be available for my patreons now this piece of paper might have the potential to justify buying a premium monitor it's a factory calibration report that comes with the expensive acer and this is something that's usually reserved for higher end monitors if that saves us from buying an expensive calorimeter and doing all the calibration stuff ourselves then this could easily offset the price difference well comparing both monitors with their out of the box settings we quote unquote factory calibrated acer actually looks worse both visually and in terms of measurement results though taking a closer look at the fine print and the calibration report asa stated that the dedicated srgb mode is what got their calibration treatment so switching to that mode the results actually look more favorable for the expensive acer now though this is still far off from what you can achieve with individual calibration and profiling and unlike the srgb mode this will give us much better accuracy for other color spaces as well and not just for srgb so a factory calibration definitely is no substitute for the real deal thus this piece of paper does not offset the cost of getting a calorimeter or even just borrowing or renting one which really isn't that expensive calibrating and profiling the cheaper monitor will get us much farther in terms of accuracy especially as the base performance of both panels is pretty similar the acer gets marginally brighter and can be set to a slightly lower brightness as well but these differences are so small that they are very difficult to pick up unless you're comparing them directly side by side the same is true for the contrast ratio which is higher for the sr but just a bit now as you probably can already guess from these bags hdr isn't particularly good on either of these monitors so paying almost twice as much 100 does not save you from getting the same wannabe hdr implementation you'll be getting from many cheaper monitors as well now of course this video's intention is not to tell you that every expensive monitor is bad value and certainly not every cheap monitor is great or even worth buying either but i believe that many of these premium monitors offer nothing more than a bunch of features and gimmicks that most people probably don't even need when it comes to actual gaming performance or general image quality they often are very similar to much cheaper offerings of the same category in many instances it makes much more sense stretching for the next category of monitors and getting something like a 240hz 1440p monitor instead of a premium 144hz monitor for almost the same price or just save some money and go for a well-performing cheaper monitor like the msi g273qf of course not every cheap monitor is that good but that's why i specifically selected the g273qf for this video i will link the full review on screen in case you want to check that out thanks for watching mr next video

Channel: techless

Views: 480,658

Keywords: cheap vs expensive, 1440p monitor, gaming monitor, qhd monitor, cheap monitor, expensive monitor, response times, color accuracy, 165 Hz, 170 Hz

Id: vm2_P1MvG0c

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021