QD-OLED Price Drop? Will LCDs Remain Relevant? 1440p 240Hz or 4K 144Hz? December Q&A

welcome back to monitors unboxed for a December q a session when I started this channel I was really hoping to get out q a sessions more frequently than I have but been a bit busy lately doing things like building this set we've also of course tested a lot of monitors lately on this very Channel which hopefully have all seen and watched those reviews also you guys asked over 200 questions on the YouTube Community tab so thanks very much to all of you who did submit a question for this video plus we've got a heap more from our Discord supporters those who support us on patreon and float plan so heaps of questions knock unfortunately not going to be able to get to all of them but like I said there will be many more q a sessions coming up next year where we'll get to answering plenty of your questions so yeah if your question wasn't answered in this video don't worry we will there'll be playing more opportunities for that later anyway let's get into the questions all right first question is from UB Hunter thanks for asking this one how much improvement does a higher refresh rate monitor make if the refresh compliance is low for example the MSI mag274 qrx is a 240Hz monitor but only has a 20 refresh compliance using the best overdrive mode at Max refresh does using something like that still feel smoother and more responsive than a 165hz monitor with 90 plus refresh compliance or does the ghosting and blur mitigate the benefits of the extra Hertz so yeah refresh compliance a lot of interesting things to talk about here I think refresh compliance is kind of one component that you get from a testing sort of these high refresh rate monitors and it only refers to one area of performance that extra Hertz tends to bring when you get a high refresh rate you tend to get improvements in smoothness and that's because more frames are being delivered and refresh compliance doesn't really impact that so if you're playing at 165 Hertz you're obviously going to be getting 165 frames per second 240 hertz here 240 frames per second more frames it's going to feel smoother even with low refresh compliance because they're simply more frames being displayed similarly with latency generally High refresh rate monitors is going to provide lower latency because they're refreshing more often and that typically won't be impacted by refresh compliance either so when you're comparing 240 hertz low refresh compliance to 165 Hertz High refresh compliance the 240Hz monitor is still going to be better for smoothness still going to be better for latency so those two things are kind of separate with refresh compliance what we're really testing for is what's the limit of the motion Clarity that that monitor is going to provide when we get higher refresh rates monitors do provide better motion Clarity because you're getting more frames which means as you're tracking things moving across the screen on a sample and hold monitor more samples are being shown the difference between each frame is lower so you're going to get less blur attributed attributable to the refresh rate but then on top of that you're also going to see some blur relating to the response times so when you see those UFO test results the blur that you're seeing is a combination of both the response times and also the refresh rate and that's why even when we're testing like a 120 hertz OLED which might have you know sub one millisecond response times it still looks a bit blurry so what we're really looking for with refresh compliance is how is there any difference between say running at 200 Hertz versus 240 hertz we're still going to be getting some blur at 200 Hertz and at 240Hz because of the refresh rate but is that limited by the response times you know is the monitor too slow so it's kind of going backwards effectively going backwards in terms of the motion Clarity side of things and that's where things like 20 refresh compliance come into play you know we're looking at okay maybe this monitor it only really has the performance to show 200 Hertz or maybe 180 Hertz or whatever it is then the motion Clarity benefits as you on that same monitor go from 180 to 200 to 240 it may not appear visually very different and we sort of saw some of this when we were testing the very early 1080p 360hz displays we got 360 Hertz in and it provided a small motion Clarity benefit compared to some of the 240Hz monitors but the response times weren't up to the standard of something like today's pg27aun where the response times really are giving you the full benefit of that refresh rate so potentially if the I can't quite remember the results from that MSI monitor but potentially if the refresh compliance is low enough then the motion quality that you're getting isn't going to be that much different to running at 165 Hertz but you still would be gaining the smoothness and latency benefits so that's just something that you have to weigh up when buying those monitors I tend to think 240 hertz over 165 usually those marches are at least going to be good around 200 Hertz in terms of refresh compliance possibly a little higher than that as well and certainly there are lots of products that do really good refresh compliance at that refresh rate so for me I would still tend to think that buying 240 hertz is worth it whereas if this was like a 360 versus 240Hz example where you're really significantly relying on the the motion Clarity benefits then maybe it's not as much of it doesn't make it as worth it to buy the higher refresh rate monitor but yeah like I said it's just one component that we look at in terms of performance and it's just one part of the story for the motion side of things when it comes to monitors if you play on a fixed refresh rate does your overdrive setting matter even if you aren't getting enough fps to match Hertz so I guess there's a couple of ways of looking at this question overdrive settings always matter from one perspective or another if you're looking at this sort of question and you're thinking okay I've got a monitor which doesn't have a single overdrive mode experience then if you're playing on a fixed refresh rate it doesn't really matter too much whether it does or doesn't have a single overdrive mode experience because you would just choose the best overdrive setting for that refresh rate it wouldn't really matter whether it can or can't really handle variable refresh rate gaming even if you aren't you know running at the same FPS as your Hertz on the monitor so from that side of things yeah fixture refresh rate gaming overdrive things don't matter as much because you're not having to consider the variable refresh rate aspect of things which is pretty typical if you're playing competitive games if you've got a 165 Hertz monitor you're playing fortnite OverWatch those sort of games where you can run at 165 Hertz then yeah the overdrive settings for variable refresh rate gaming or low refresh rates don't matter but overdrive settings do still matter even when you're running at fixed Hertz because you're going to get better performance at certain overdrive settings even at that singular refresh rate so it is still important to look at best overdrive settings for that refresh rate and optimize to get based around that even if you are and that is also true even if you aren't getting enough FPS because the monitor is still refreshing at that same refresh rate it's just going to be duplicating frames or tearing frames depending on whether you're running vsync on or off but you still are going to want to get the clarity benefits of when the monitor is able to show a frame which let's say you're playing at 60 FPS on a 120 hertz monitor every second frame is going to be duplicated but when that first frame is shown if you've got your overdrive scenes tuned you're still going to get the best experience when that frame is displayed so it definitely still matters overdrive settings when running at fixed refresh rates but yeah it doesn't matter as significantly as if you were using say adaptive sync or variable refresh rates should all future monitors support at least one USBC input that has DisplayPort capabilities also do you think that USBC connectors will eventually phase out HDMI and DisplayPort connectors for display in and out it's a good question from a number of perspectives I think we don't see USBC in a lot of monitors right now because most monitors are designed for desktop gaming and not a lot of graphics cards use USBC outputs if I think even the RTX 40 series removed USBC maybe that was done on the RTX 30 series but certainly the latest Nvidia gpus removed USBC as one of the standard display outputs that you get preferring the standard HDMI DisplayPort connectors so monitors are still going to generally prefer the connectors that you would see on graphics cards in most desktop PCS because that's what they're designed for I still do think though that USBC is a good input to include because it does support a lot of people using laptops USBC is very common with DP alt mode for laptops and if you're buying a desktop monitor potentially you're using it for a laptop potentially you're using for a desktop and a laptop in which case USBC becomes really important so I'm not sure whether they should all include it it's kind of a is that going to be a deciding factor and a review for me Pro probably not are probably going to stick to more the panel performance side of things as opposed to whether it does or doesn't have USBC I don't think it's a deal breaker but I think it would be nice as for do you think the USBC connectors will eventually phase out HDMI DisplayPort that is a trickier one I think the issue with USBC is it's you can do so many things with USBC that it's hard to tell what each port and what each cable and what each connector can actually do like is that USBC port on your display you know does it do the right power delivery specs does it do DisplayPort alt mode or is it just it could be a USBC input that only links it for the OSD settings or for the you know the software utilities that a lot of monitor manufacturers provide might not be an actual display connector now I hope monitor manufacturers don't do that but USBC does provide the capabilities to have one monitor which allows you to use USBC for the display connection another monitor where it's only used for OSD control and software side of things so from that perspective you know HDMI and DisplayPort are more I guess easier to understand from a consumer perspective display porn HDMI only do display connections so if you've got them it's really clear what you can and can't plug into the monitor if it's got DisplayPort you can only plug in DisplayPort devices if it's got USBC there's potentially some confusion around that so I don't think we'll see HDMI and DisplayPort phased out also the you know the cable quality comes into play here maybe DisplayPort canables especially for like lower refresh rate monitors might be more reliable than you would see from a USBC cable you need to make sure you've got a really high quality USBC cable to run High refresh rate high resolution monitors there might be more availability of those cables for DisplayPort or certainly would be easier to tell that you've got a good quality cable when you've got a DisplayPort cable versus USBC when some USBC cables you know they're only designed for charging phones and that sort of thing so yeah there's sort of lots of things to consider here I think it should be included as an input on modes I think it's a good inclusion but yeah I don't think it's going to be replacing the standard connectors that we've got anytime soon next question do you expect IPS slash VA panels to remain relevant long term or will OLED take over in coming years yeah not sure about this one it's always one of these predicting the future questions so who knows maybe look back at this in a few years and I will have been horribly wrong I think IPS and VA will still remain relevant for the time being especially because you know OLED has existed for a little while now especially on the TV side of things so you know they're just sort of becoming new on the monitor side it's very exciting that we're getting all advantages for the first time but TVs you know all Lids have been around for oh we're probably approaching a decade now don't quote me on that one but we are certainly approaching many years of oleds and LCDs being viable and even throughout all that time there is still a reason to buy LCD panels you might not want to deal with the burning risk so for example if you have children that might maybe leaving static content on the screen for long periods of time you just want the the reliability to and you know you want to know that that's not going to be an issue for you then you'd buy an LCD or potentially you're running you're displaying a really bright environment you might want to go LCD because they're brighter and I think those benefits to IPS and VA panels will remain for the next couple of years when faced up against OLED you're also going to get the benefit of Cheaper panels like is OLED going to be coming to the 200 300 sort of price points that we see IPS and VA panels a lot especially for monitors I think that's pretty unlikely so yeah I would still expect IPS and VA to be the dominant tech for those sort of bang for buck budget monitors if you're buying say 1440p 165 Hertz it's pretty likely for next views that's still going to be an LCD based panel as for like your high-end gaming yeah probably if you're spending a thousand dollars and you want HDR then all that is likely to become a very dominant player in that market but as for taking over I think until OLED can really solve those issues with burn-in brightness considerations pixel you know pixel structures another one you know is it suitable for day desktop productivity use because of you know maybe weird subpixel layout and also the burn-in considerations you know all those things are going to play out for OLED versus LCD and I still think there are going to be people even when they're buying high-end monitors that may choose an LCD with mini LEDs as opposed to oleds because they might have a certain use case for them that makes the LCD option better so yeah all is going to be great but I don't think it's taking over in the next couple years do you believe kudi old Ed monitors will come down significantly in price next year with several new models being announced coming out I want an upgrade but would love to see them break below the 1000 US dollar mark first well this is one of these questions where I could be burnt pretty hard on because I was expecting the Cutie old monitors that we've got to be more expensive than they are I think that the Alienware monitor coming out at thirteen hundred dollars we've now got the DWF variant for eleven hundred dollars you know before those before those displays were announced if you said they were going to be below fifteen hundred dollars I probably wouldn't have believed you I was pretty convinced that they would be very expensive products but they've turned out to be pretty reasonable so I don't want to say for certain that they're not going to quickly drop in price below a thousand dollars but again we're sort of talking about high-end monitor Technologies so would they come down in price significantly I'm not sure I think around a thousand dollars maybe 900 or even 800 is possible especially because we've got say LG's 42-inch OLED TVs they typically go on sale for like 900 U.S we're starting to see some of the true HDR monitors the Neo G7 for example that dropped to 800 US during the latest sales so I think that sort of where we're seeing high-end monitor pricing at the moment possibly could get down to around there but if you're talking like 500 I think that's almost certainly not going to happen but yeah if I was sort of looking at an upgrade for Cutie OLED and we're sort of seeing those new say the MSI variant the Samsung variant of the QD OLED Ultra wide then yeah if it gets to a thousand dollars I think that would be a really good price but I would be more expecting those monitors to be similarly priced to what we've already got in the sort of 1100 to 1300 price range so we'll see about that there is obviously a lot of competition coming so hopefully there'll be a bit of a price war on those Technologies um but yeah I'd sort of be looking at if you can get something for a thousand dollars you've done really well so that's sort of where I'd be looking at next question do you personally prioritize a high refresh rate slash good response panel or a better HDR performing panel slash more color accurate display for your general use such as your own personal monitor it's a really tricky question to answer because I kind of like having the best of everything if possible so for my personal use I tend to I guess not always use high-end displays but typically you know I've got access to quite a few displays so I tend to use the one of the best displays I can't have access to so if we're talking purely about gaming then for me being more of a single player game and not someone that's super interested in competitive games I personally would prefer to use an HDR capable monitor than let's say the pg27aqn that does 360 Hertz if I was mostly playing like maybe competitive games like fortnite then yeah maybe I'd be choosing the Asus monitor whereas for me I do use the Alienware aw3423dw because it delivers really good HDR performance it's got reasonable color accuracy and also does have really good response time so when I'm playing it 175 Hertz it feels really fast and clear in motion which is something that I I do like even playing single player games I think that does have benefits so so for me buying monitors I would tend to swing for gaming more towards the HDR route and I probably would go with an older I mean I did actually buy the Alienware monitor so I guess I did buy the display I use for gaming more of a work slash testing related purchase but yeah that that's how I would generally go with things and but then but then again like even if I was choosing an HDR monitor with good car accuracy if that was the way I went I still wouldn't tolerate really slow response times so if you're kind of tossing up between a bounce product that did balanced HDR and bounce response times versus really good HDR with really bad response times I would still choose I think the More Bounce product just because things like VA smearing is really horrible like I think we've gone well past that in monitor tech in the last couple years where you don't really need to deal with that issue so for me yeah I would still choose the the more HDR focused things as long as it's balanced however if we're talking about like my productivity monitor that I would use with my workstation Asian for editing videos then there's a whole other sort of consideration for there and I wouldn't really be choosing HDR for that but then I wouldn't be choosing necessarily good response times either because that's also not that important I would definitely be prioritizing things like screen uniformity color accuracy especially like does it have Hardware SDR modes or Hardware calibration I still want higher fresh rate when I'm doing my productivity work and editing I still think 60 hertz is very slow these days don't really want to be using that so I still do use I guess you'd call the more gaming Focus monitors for productivity work but again it'll be things like how good's the srgb mode how good is the calibration how easy is it to calibrate you know what's the color performance like uniform it is you've got good pixel structure all those sorts of things were playing to that decision so yeah with my new setup where I've got a workstation and gaming setup separately I can sort of prioritize a bit better between the monitors I've available for me but yeah I'm rarely going to be choosing a 240Hz display especially with what we've got on the market today maybe those new oleds coming out will tempt me over but yeah for now the Alienware has been really good some people have tried 8K gaming and noticed the differences are practically imperceptible from 4K with resolution reaching a point of imperceptibility and frame rate increases with extremely minimal gameplay slash enjoyment benefits like going from 240 fps to 360 what are some changes some big changes you predict monitor developers will pursue in the future yeah I think resolution is kind of one of the least important things to be upgrading in a monitor at the moment we've got 4K which has been you know for most for most sizes that you would typically use on a desktop like 27 32 inch um eight with 4K is pretty much fine like you wouldn't really get much benefit going from 8K 8K may be a benefit if you went for like a 42 inch monitor maybe depending on how sensitive you are to resolution but certainly it's not an area that I would be prioritizing if I was designing monitors right now I do think that there are many areas that developers will be pursuing in the future the biggest one is sort of how do we tackle all of the HDR capabilities that is designed into this standard like the HDR 10 standard Dolby Vision standard Rec 2020 how do we get monitors doing all of that stuff because right now we've got monitors that top out maybe at best at like 85 Rec 2020 coverage so can we go the full Rec 2020 coverage that says probably not a high priority but certainly something to to think about there also on top of that you know how do we get all the range of HDR being possible in all conditions because right now most H jump displays are sort of they're thinking of compromises about how to do things do we need to do tone mapping because the brightness of the display doesn't get bright enough to display a lot of content in that case can we push brightness higher can we push brightness higher for full screen sizes so that we don't need to rely on brightness limiters and abls more often can we get all conditions that we want to display to do all the brightnesses like let's say we've got a 2000 monitor can we do that from everything from full screen white all the way down to like one percent or less than that you know does the dimming abilities that we've got allow us to show bright and dark areas close together and how tight can we get that dimming can we show things like Star Fields really bright but with really deep blacks at the same time I think a lot of the focus that we'll see for improvements for monitors and display Tech over the next couple of years next maybe decade is going to be solving a lot lot of those considerations so obviously they're still going to be incremental improvements for things like response times if we're talking the LCD side of things in terms of refresh rate can we get higher and higher and higher but I think the biggest gains that we've seen from monitors in the last couple of years and TVs and all those sorts of things is answering those questions of let's let's bring up brightness let's increase the amount of dimming zones let's get contrast better let's target HDR and make it so that when you know Movie Makers are mastering their stuff on thirty thousand dollar mastering displays that a consumer who only has a thousand dollars to spend can still get a very similar experience that said I still think there are going to be benefits from increasing things like response times and refresh rates even going from 240 to 360 has benefits for smoothness and latency it does feel better to use a monitor like that especially if you then go backwards it's always more noticeable when you upgrade to a higher refresh rate you get used to it then you go backwards to the low refresh rate and obviously with all monitor Technologies at the moment really harnessing sample and hold the higher that we go in things like refresh rate the better we're going to get in terms of motion Clarity we're not going to be able we're not going to need to rely on backlight strobing as much because the refresh rate is just going to be so high that the difference between each frame is going to be very low and we're not going to get as much sample and hold motion blur so yeah I agree that resolution is one of those things that's really at sort of diminishing returns level at the moment but I think in terms of response times refresh rates HDR capabilities brightness color gamut there's still so many areas where displays can improve I think what you'll see a decade from now is going to be significantly better than what we've got even today even as good as some of those oleds and those sorts of things look I think there's still many areas to improve if a monitor doesn't have a single overdrive experience would you potentially recommend lowering the maximum refresh rate for example setting a maximum of 120 hertz if a 165 Hertz monitor can't cover its entire refresh range at one setting um no that's not really something I would consider doing maybe you know I can't really speak for everyone there may be a use case where you find a benefit for that potentially the maybe the performance is really bad across the entire refresh range but I think the easiest way to sort of deal with that scenario is just lowering the overdrive setting If you're sort of concerned about oh I've got a 165 Hertz monitor you know I'm expecting to play 60 FPS all the way up to 165 Hertz you know is there going to be a benefit there if I just cap it to 120 just let my games run only up to 120 but still you know get the benefit of 60 FPS I think doing that's not going to be as advantageous as just lowering the overdrive setting a little bit and optimizing more for low refresh rate gaming so when it comes to these like single overdrive mode experience versus dual overdrive mode you kind of typically are going to be tossing up between do I preference gaming at a high refresh rate in which case I'll use a slightly higher overdrive setting or do I preference scamming a slightly lower overdrive setting in which case our preference a lower over you know overdrive and refresh rate and all that so typically you know if you're playing at a higher refresh rate the the issue that you'll get dragged into with those non-single overdrive mode monitors is that you'll see a lot of overshoot when gaming at 60fps which is I guess what this person is sort of thinking about with this question you know maybe if I instead optimize for low refresh rates instead and then I'm not going to get that overshoot and then if I cap it at 120 hertz I'm not going to deal with the slower response times at higher refresh rates but I think a lot of people will only see very minor impacts from lowering the refresh from lowering the overdrive setting and then still running at 165 Hertz yeah you may not be getting the full motion Clarity benefits of 165 Hertz you may have low refresh compliance it may still have a lot of blur and ghosting at those sorts of high refresh rates but you're still going to be getting the smoothness benefits and the latency benefits from running at 165 Hertz I think those benefits offset the sort of I guess Clarity differences from optimizing for the lower refresh rate configuration so I wouldn't really recommend capping monitors in that sense I think you would just if you're worried about sort of not getting overshoot you want to optimize for low refresh rate just set your overdrive scene for a lower refresh rate and then yeah if you're pushing frame rates above 120 honestly it's probably not going to be that bad it isn't going to be as optimal as if you bought a single overdrive mode experience monitor though they are typically more expensive um but yeah I don't think refresh capping is really the solution to that sort of conundrum with your monitor when I buy a new monitor what steps do you recommend I take for calibration I know that the out of box experience varies greatly from Monitor to Monitor and all my knowledge on it is to change the ICC profile is there anything more past that so this is one of those tricky questions because to get the best calibration experience you're going to need external hardware like a Colorimeter i1 display spider X something like that because not only is that going to allow you to generate a specific ICC profile for your monitor which is going to be the most accurate but it's also going to allow you to profile different areas to perform it so for example if you're willing to know what is the exact brightness setting that I need to run at 100 nits or 200 nits you're not going to be able to judge that by eye you're going to need a tool what about what's the highest contrast ratio setting am I getting clipping or other issues from Raising contrast too much again a Colorimeter is going to tell you that with the the greatest level of accuracy so when it comes like the out of box experience it really depends on what other stuff have you got available to you can you compare it to a known accurate display that's going to give you some indication of what settings you need to change but generally speaking you're going to need a reference it's not you're not going to be able to tell by eye you know I've tested a lot of monitors at this point and I'm getting a little better at telling when things are are correct or not just from my eye but even then it's not I'm not even close to you know the performance that I get from a tool right like I'm just I I can tell a few things but I'm just not capable of doing what you know calibration tools can do and that's with a fair bit of experience testing these things so yeah I think if you're just trying to eyeball it look you know out of the box you're probably going to be able to tell if something is really off like if the um the white balance is really tinted either too cool or too warm you're probably going to be able to tell that especially up against a standard reference monitor but the things that I would do if I had a monitor and I just bought it I want to consider the out-of-box experience these days most monitors do come with pretty reasonable factory settings most of the monitors that I test may not be super accurate in terms of like Delta E's below 2 or below one or whatever where targeting but they're still going to be pretty good like you're not going to have to make too many adjustments to contrast settings or gamma settings generally what they use out of the box is going to be close to the most accurate settings maybe one or two tweaks all that's necessary so from that perspective I would just look at sort of a review and and sort of see how accurate is that out of box experience um if it's wildly off then I'd be messing around with the settings trying to get that looking a bit better there have been examples of monitors with wildly off white balance out of the box but lots of them look pretty good the only thing I would also consider is like do I want if I've bought a wide Gap monitor do I want to run it in the sigb mode and is the srgb mode any good hopefully again a review is sort of going to give you an indication of that but that's sort of something I'd be considering if I'm using it as an SDR monitor I generally would recommend enabling the SDM srgb mode sorry or potentially using one of the software utilities that you've got on your computer again there's like the no video srgb utility if you've got Nvidia GPU things like that to sort of reduce some of the saturation and over saturation you might get with a wide Gap monitor so yeah I think that's sort of the main steps that I would take but yeah generally these days more managers have gotten to a point where you're not getting a terrible out of box experience someone is a better than others in terms of how accurate and calibrated they are but they're not going to give you wildly horrible things like a lot especially with TVs a lot of the time where you'd get a bad image quality straight out of the box is going to be because of processing features like noise reduction or motion smoothing a big thing for TVs to turn off and yeah generally you'd want to turn all that stuff off but on monitors a lot of that stuff doesn't apply they don't tend to apply noise reduction and you know those sorts of things out of the box so yeah not have to worry about it too much I don't think as someone interested in getting a 4K 32 inch monitor is it worth it over a 1440p 32 inch and since I am aiming to build a new system what specs should I be aiming for if I want to play on high settings so as far as like what system you should buy and what specs you should get definitely recommend checking out our other channel Hardware unbox where you get all the recommendations on hardware for gaming 4K or 1440p there um generally these days with upscaling things like dlss FSR you may not necessarily need too much of a hardware upgrade it depends what you're coming from of course if you're on a really old GPU then it's probably worth looking at a more powerful product there but yeah upscaling and things are going to work pretty well for 4K these days when it comes to the monitor side of things though do you go 4K 32 inch or do you go 1440 32 inch I think a lot of this is going to come down to the pricing of the displays if we take a really good value product like for example gigabytes m32q versus m32u so they're both 32 inch size both the same family of displays I guess you'd say and then the U model 4K the Q model 1440p to get the m32q you're looking at about 330 us these days for the m32u the 4K model you're looking at about 600 us so you're not quite having to double the price but it's pretty close to needing to double all the price so that's going to play significantly on this discussion I think for a lot of people who are just doing gaming first like you're buying a monitor it's primarily going to be for gaming you're not doing a heap of web browsing or productivity work or writing documents you've got yourself for gaming then I think it's you're going to get a better bang for buck a better value getting the 1440p option A lot of people complain about 32-inch 1440p pixel density not being as good as 4K that's definitely true you're going to get better image quality going 4K at 32 inches you're going to get better resolution for things like editing documents web browsing anything text Drive is going to look a lot better on the 4K display games though they are going to look better at 4K 32 inch but 1440p 32 inch in my opinion it still looks pretty good and when you're talking about 330 versus 600 for gaming only with a lot of the specs otherwise pretty similar I think the bang for buck factor is pretty clearly in the 1440p class there but then again if you have the money to spend like you were budgeting to spend around 600 on a monitor or even higher than that then there are benefits to getting 4K even for gaming it is a better experience you are gonna you know not gonna see as much aliasing the pixels aren't going to be as obvious and those things do play out for games and again a lot of the time these days you can use technology like dlss and FSR to limit the frame rate hit that you're going to get upgrade your resolution in that way but for me the reason why I would go 4K is if I was using the monitor for other things as well if I was web browsing or editing even spreadsheets or editing videos or photo editing in Photoshop or any of those sorts of things 4K is a significant upgrade not just for the resolution and Clarity of the text but you can depending on how good your eyesight is and how close you want to use the monitor you can also tend to you know mess around with the scaling settings so you can fit physical you know not physically but you can fit more stuff on the screen at the same time which may have a benefit for you depending on what sort of things you're doing and again how good your eyesight is so if I wanted a balanced experience for multiple use cases 4K 32 inch definitely the way to go plenty of benefits for spending nearly double the amount but if I was going gaming only I think bang for buck fact is definitely with the 1440p option just because that price difference is still quite significant if the 4K option was down around 400 maybe 500 it would be a bit of a different discussion but I think with pricing as it is today that's that's the sort of thing I would go with with good monitor deals coming this month which upgrade do you see as having more value over 27 inch 2K 144hz so Baseline 1440p 140 votes all right and then so the two options we've got high refresh rate like 240 hertz gigabyte m27qx that you've recommended recently or 4K like the gigabyte m28u and others so yeah I imagine a fair few people are sort of going to be tossing this up um because the the 4K options typically are still slightly more expensive than the m27qx the m27qx is about 400 the 4K options I know the m28u has been as low as about 450 but typically you're looking at 500 to 550 us for the 4K option and this is sort of a little bit different to the 32 inch discussion where we're sort of talking 4K versus 1440p what are the sort of price differences how much can you save this is kind of like same budget do I go 1440p 240 or do I go 4K um sort of 144 Hertz and I think this is it's all it's a very similar sort of answer to what I gave previously if you're looking for something that's bounced and versatile for multiple use cases then you'd probably go the 4K option so if you're gaming you're browsing the web productivity work you you have a home office or something that you also use for gaming similar to me for example or you know you're doing Photoshop work the 4K display is going to have many benefits for you and depending on the games that you play also the you know the 4K mods is going to be really well suited to that high refresh rate high resolution it's going to look great for your sort of single player tiles and even some multiplayer gaming as well if you're not super needing those sort of latency benefits and higher refresh rate that those other products can can bring so yeah if I'm if I'm a multi-use sort of monitor user I had multiple use cases gaming was part of that and I think the 4K option is probably where I would go for most of those users but then if I was gaming only then potentially the 1440p 240Hz option is where I would go not only are they a little bit cheaper the 240Hz option is obviously great for Competitive Gaming so if I was playing heaps of multiplayer titles things like you know the new Call of Duty game OverWatch fortnite those sort of games then 1440p 240 hertz I think would clearly be in the lead there if you know if I was running on low settings and I was getting over 200 FPS then the 240Hz monitor is going to give me benefits there not just in terms of latency which is obviously a big consideration but also motion carry it's going to be easy to spot enemies there's going to be less blur on a monitor like that you're going to get a lot of benefits but also even if you were only playing single player titles I think the 1440p 240 hertz option does give you a lot of room for future Hardware upgrades and yes games also going to get harder to run on newer Hardware but today if you're buying an RTX 4080 or RTX 4090 which again is very high in Hardware so would you pair that with the 400 display I'm not sure but certainly as you're upgrading to Hardware down the track where a 40 90 may be coming down in price with the future generation or something like that then I think what we're going to be seeing is that that monitor is going to give you more Headroom for the future and maybe you've got a favorite game that you love playing maybe that's exceeding 144 Hertz now you can run it at 200 FPS 240 FPS and yet it's maybe not necessary for single player gaming but it will still give you a better experience it's going to be clearer to to see all that sort of thing so I think that's sort of where I'd go gaming only what that future proofing and upgrading doing Competitive Gaming 1440p 240Hz makes the most sense if I was more inclined towards single player gaming or if I needed a versatile bounce product for multiple use cases then I'd go with the 4k monitor why don't most 1440p gaming monitors come with an srgb mode enabled by default and focus on good Factory calibration for that mode since that's what matters in games and most applications while wide gamut is mostly only for professional work the Asus pg279qm does this but it costs 750 it seems odd to me that there are a lot of mid-range options marketed for gaming but not heavily focusing on srgb Factory performance I think there's a few reasons for this I think the main reason is that while accuracy may be important for people like us that watch enthusiasts monitor channels test monitors are really keyed into things like accuracy being important I think when you're looking at casual buyers your sort of typical buyer having the wide gamut mode enabled by default is going to give you more wow factor so it's not going to be accurate but you're going to see increased saturation people are going to get their monitor out of the box they're going to use it they're going to be like wow the colors on this they look better than my previous non-wide gamut monitor you know the better colors you know that that looks better to me you know we've seen this with say processing photos on phones over time they've gone for more saturation over the years as opposed to doing the more natural processing look I think we see similar with displays especially if you're buying at a retail store where all the displays are sort of there and you're comparing them one versus the other you want you know you're going to be drawn towards the monitor with the most Vibrance the most saturation the widest color gamut out of the box so I think I think that's the main reason why monitor manufacturers stick with wide gamut modes being enabled out of the box they want people to be wowed straight away and to be very impressed with their purchase the second reason I think is that a lot of monitors the scalar isn't good enough to support an srgb mode with other settings being unlocked so on a lot of monitors if they shoot with the srgb mode enabled by default which I think is still the best way of doing things then you're going to run into issues where people can't change the white balance they can't change the gamma settings these are sayings that a lot of people do mess around with which are enabled when the white Gammon mode when the wide gamut mode sorry is enabled so when we see all those factors the sort of the Vibrance out of the box wiring people and also the sort of some of the scale limitations I think that's where most monitor manufacturers gravitate towards that one option if this if scales were better and were able to support things like srgba modes plus a lot of the settings unlocked and giving you the full flexibility to just switched between srgb and wide gamut with no restrictions which would be the ideal way of doing things so I wish every monitor would do that then I think you'd see more launches may be going the accuracy route and that's where you know monitors like the pg279qm come into play that much has a g-sync module it's more powerful scale it allows the OEM to set an srgb mode without you know restricting any of those features and that's why I think Brands like Asus are more comfortable doing that because again you sort of you're buying a high-end product you're probably more of an Enthusiast you're going to be using those sorts of features you want the best accuracy and also the scalar can support all the different configurations that someone might want to run so hopefully over time we will see I think more of a focus towards monitors that in the SDR mode run using Rec 709 colors srgb colors with good accuracy they enable that mode by default and then when the HDR mode is enabled they switch over to the wide Gantt mode I think that's the bit that's sort of where we're heading towards it makes the most sense but for now a lot of Hardware isn't quite good enough or powerful enough to do that just yet unfortunately but yeah that's sort of where we're aiming for with these reviews and why we encourage sort of srgb mode accuracy those sorts of things because I do think it's important all right and that does it for this month's q a session thanks to everyone who submitted questions whether that was on the YouTube Community tab or in our Discord Community I know we only answered about 12 out of well over 200 questions but I still really appreciate everyone that does submit your questions I enjoy reading them all sort of saying you know what are the sort of talking points of today I think it's good to know all that stuff for reviews and sort of the the content that we want to make in the future so really appreciate all of you guys but also if your question wasn't answered then you will have an opportunity in a Future q a to submit your questions because I'm planning more regular q a sessions on this channel especially with the volume of questions that we are getting also if you do want to support monitors unboxed Hardware unbox the whole family that we've got here please do consider supporting us on patreon or floatplan links to those in the description you will get access to our Discord Community where we have our our own q a channel where you can answer questions and I'm probably more likely to see your question in there as well you'll gain access to things like monthly live streams BTS videos ICC profiles all that good stuff so thanks for watching this one it's probably been a long one not sure I think I've been recording for like an hour now so we'll see what it comes out to in the final video thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one [Music] foreign

Channel: Monitors Unboxed

Views: 141,795

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Id: 852qGe6-i8E

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022