Don’t waste your money on "premium" monitors

I guess you're probably aware that large companies like PNG Kell or Toyota are using different brands to appeal to different types of consumers and in the PC Hardware segment we have something very similar for instance there's Aus putting a tough logo on the more budget conscious products while using the shiny Rog brand extension to catch in on people's desire for more premium product and of course there's still and Alienware and yeah you would expect that the premium brand product Alienware monitor in this case has the better performance better design and maybe even a better build quality and also higher price but here it's more expensive because it's the superior product overall right well that doesn't have to be the case okay let's take a closer look at these two monitors the Del Brer product is a 27 in 1440p monitor it has an IPS panel and a refresh rate of 165 HZ and the Alienware it's using a 27in IPS panel as well also 1440p but the refresh rate brace yourself is a whopping 180 HZ yeah that's not a huge upgrade the price difference however is pretty steep I have this link down below if you want to check the current pricing in your region but at the time of making this video dels monitor can be had for just about 250 us while the alien wear costs about $360 that's an insane price difference for monitors that have essentially the same specs so is it Justified somehow like is this Alienware branded monitor really that much better when it comes to stuff like image quality response times or color accuracy at the very least the Alienware are trying to create the impression that this monitor is superior on the technically more advanced product like when you look at the images from the Amazon listings it looks like the Dell was a much older monitor I mean look at these huge bezels the Alienware brand monitor on the other hand looks super modern with like no bezels at all but yeah in reality the graphics department just went totally overboard when photoshopping the wallpaper onto the Alienware monitor the bezels on the re monitor don't look like this at all and it's actually pretty deceiving what they've done here if you put both monitors side by side the bezels really look identical they're about 7 to 8 mm wide on both monitors nevertheless the Alienware has a few design gimmicks that the Del version doesn't have the stand design is a bit more complex and its cable tunnel is a bit nicer and of course there's RGB on the back of the monitor but that's pretty much it the ergonomics are virtually identical and both monitors are made from Plastics okay some of the materials that are being used on the Alienware feel slightly more premium to the touch but the Dell really has a good build quality too a feature that the Dell doesn't have though is an integrated USB hub which is also nice to have I guess but these small differences really cannot justify the much higher price I mean $110 for RGB marginally better Plastics and a use be Hub really don't seem like a good deal so yeah what about the image quality or are these two just using the same display after all I mean I wouldn't even be surprised if D we're just putting the same display in electronics in a different case slip an Alienware logo on it add some RGB and sell it with a markup fortunately though that's not the case here taking a close look at both panels we can clearly see that these are different the Dell has a very traditional sub pixel shape whereas Alienware model has Chevron shaped pixels which are a Telltale sign that this panel is made by LG display if you put an LG display panel next to it the resemblance is pretty obvious and the G27 24d it's using a panel made by tpv as a was is able to find out in the Factory menu hard to say which one of these two panels is more expensive without knowing the exact models but my guess would be it's the one made by LG display so this might explain part of the price difference and performance-wise the Alienware is off to a good start offering a pretty large color gamut volume of 146% as opposed to the 121% of the Dell side by side the difference is rather subtle though you might be able to spot a bit more color saturation here and there on the alware monitor but it's really not a massive difference what's a bit more obvious though is the slight red purple shift on the Alienware monitor like take a look at the beach for example the Dell on the left really does a better job here and keep in mind that I've already adjusted both monitors to the same brightness and white point for this test this mostly is a grayscale related issue and without of the Box settings the Alienware would have even had a harder time here because the factory setup is actually slightly worse than on the cheaper Dell I mean both Factory setups aren't exactly great which is okay considering the price of the Dell but that's pretty disappointing for the rather expensive Alienware monitor I have to say after detailed color accuracy results and recommended color settings of my patrum as a public post in case you want to look at them in more detail but yeah bottom line is that the the color accuracy of the alien Rand monitor is not better than that of the Dell actually even slightly worse overall and well it doesn't stop there this is the maximum full screen brightness and the Alienware again gets beaten by the cheaper Dell even the contrast ratio of the Dell is superior pretty disappointing I have to say I mean it's really not a night and day difference but surely not what you want to see if you spend like $110 more on the Alienware model especially the brightness difference seems kind of odd to me as this probably was a deliberate decision because in HDR mode the aw 2724 DM is able to reach almost 600 nits full screen so I don't know why Alienware chose to kept the SDR brightness at just 350 nits now you might have already noticed this brightness dip towards the left side of the graph this shows that the Alienware gets way dimmer when only small parts of the image need to be bright and that's because it's using pretty aggressive EDG Li dimming as an attempt to improve the HDR experience and you can actually see this dimming in action take a look at how the backlight brightness is changing in the top right corner for example and yeah it's rather obvious that the dimming algorithm isn't exactly doing a great job it's pretty terrible so yeah the higher HDR brightness and better eotf tracking of the Alienware is a bit of a mood point considering the questionable dimming can't even be turned off and anyway the HDR performance feels kind of irrelevant to be honest as we're talking about edgelet IPS panels neither of these two will give you a good HDR experience so yeah the last chance for the Alienware aw 2724 DM to redeem itself is gaming and after all Alienware as brand is more geared towards gaming than regular Del products so this might be where it chines looking at the response times the Alienware monitor indeed scores great result that's about 2 milliseconds faster on average than the D this is with adaptive sync turn on however in typical d/ Alienware fashion the response times change when adap to syn is turned off this enables the Dell to catch up now basically matching the response times performance of the Alienware so the Alienware is only faster if you have adaptive sync turn on and besides this is how the 2 millisecond response times difference with adaptive sync turn on looks like yeah that's a negligible difference same story with adaptive sync turned off don't tell me you're seeing a massive difference here but what about lag well both have the exact same display lag of 3.1 milliseconds which is pretty quick for this glass if you want a nitpick the edenware has a slightly higher processing lag of 0.3 milliseconds but it's able to make up for that with its slightly higher refresh rate overall these two perform basically identical for gaming and that's pretty consistent with my subjective Impressions there really isn't a noteworthy difference between them I played a lot of valant on both and both of them are great basically as good as a 165 to 180 HZ IPS monitor can be the 15 Herz Gap doesn't make a difference the response times are quick on both and so is the lag and the Adaptive syn performance is Flawless on both monitors as well now why this sounds like a positive conclusion it's actually pretty disastrous for the alware monitor I mean it's being matched by the D G27 24d when it comes to all the gaming related stuff and outmatched when it comes to color accuracy brightness and contrast like don't get me wrong the Alienware aw 2724 DM is not a bad monitor not at all but the Del equivalent is an even better Monitor and it's way less expensive so yeah don't waste your money on premium brand monitors ignore the marketing and save some cash and the G27 24d well it's definitely going to be one of my new top recommendations in this class thanks for watching bu 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Channel: techless

Views: 104,939

Keywords: cheap vs expensive monitor, aw2724dm, g2724d, Dell vs Alienware

Id: 7Bj59SEc3f8

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2024