The 0.1ms Gaming Monitor – LG OLED 27"

this is a gaming monitor that is hard to believe actually exists it's an OLED panel in a 27-inch form factor running at 240 hertz I've spent about a week testing out this new monitor from LG there is a lot to talk about and today I'm going to show you pretty much everything that you need to know now firstly OLED why is that so exciting why is it such a big deal well due to the way that OLED panels are made and each pixel being self-emissive and not having a backlight passing through it like a traditional LCD display there are some really cool qualities that come with that firstly the response times are absolute Madness like they are virtually instant and secondly because each pixel can switch completely off you can achieve true blacks and really deep looking images now I have a bunch of numbers to show you today lots of cool slow motion footage and stuff like that as well but before we dive into all of that I just want to show you quickly what this looks like next to an IPS panel so over here we have a 1440p monitor it's actually the pg27 aqn from Asus which happens to be the best 1440p monitor on the market but both of them here are set to a fairly comparable brightness setting HDR is of course disabled here for both but take a look at how much more depth there is on the OLED I mean it really is just a knight and D comparison in person I will say the difference is a lot more dramatic than what you're probably seeing here on camera but even here you can hopefully appreciate how much deeper and richer the OLED panel looks versus IPS and I've got to say at least in terms of like image quality this is easily the best looking gaming monitor that I've ever seen like just the overall punchiness of the image and how clear everything is the dark areas they look truly dark and they have depth to them and the bright areas don't have any of that kind of like Haze that you see on IPS everything just looks a bit more 3D also keep in mind that the pg27 here it's a pretty top tier monitor in terms of ips panels it's by no means a bad looking display but it just goes to show how much better the OLED is in comparison now some of you might have noticed that the coding here the kind of surface finish that goes on top of the panel is not a glossy finish that you'll find on most OLED displays like a TV for example and here instead it's technically a matte finish it's more typical of what you'll find on a gaming monitor that sounds like a really bad thing to slap on top of an OLED paddle but I actually like this like a lot personally I don't think it's taking away too much at all from you know the OLED experience here and the coating itself it's not as matte as what you'll find on other gaming displays it's hard to describe but the coding here it's just very clear and I don't feel like it gets in the way too much don't get me wrong I'd still love to see what this would look like with a truly glossy finish like on a TV but image quality wise I'm not disappointed at all and let's not forget glossy panels do have their drawbacks as well now typically I don't mention image quality too much when it comes to gaming monitors and stuff like that you know usually if it's a 1440p monitor it looks like a 1440p monitor and if it has good colors well we kind of know what that looks like but this overload panel it's different like the image quality is just really really phenomenal it's probably like one of the strongest qualities of this display because you know we haven't had a 27 inch OLED monitor before and I'm telling you it looks very different to the 27 inch IPS that we've been so used to at this point I would go as far as saying that you know it's a 1440p monitor of course but you sometimes feel like you're gaming at 4K like that's how clear this monitor is and you know you might be gaming at medium settings but you kind of feel like you're gaming at like Ultra or even beyond that because all of the lighting and the depth just looks so good but now let's dive a little bit deeper and talk about those response times ever since picking up an OLED display for my living room I've always dreamed about what it would be like to have that same Tech packed into a much smaller gaming monitor what would it feel like what would the experience be like versus some of the fastest monitors on the market could this enable a truly zero motion blur experience let's start with the numbers here I've used nvidia's Elder to measure the monitor's gray to gray pixel response times in the last few monitors I've tested this with have been actually absurdly quick like the 360 Hertz salary the pg-27 they both average around 1.5 milliseconds and as we've seen this allows for very minimal motion blur as for the new LG OLED that averages just 0.1 milliseconds not only that but with just five percent overshoot what does this mean in practice well it means that basically every frame that is displayed on the monitor is almost Flawless like virtually no ghosting virtually no overshoot artifacts when paired with that Ultra clear image quality that you also get from the OLED panel you just get this super consistent you know slideshow at 240 hertz every image is just so clear all the time now to further test response times and to better visualize what these numbers actually look like in reality we use the UFO ghosting test from blowbusters.com essentially what we're looking for here is the clearest looking UFO possible so comparing the 360 Hertz 1440p from Asus to the new OLED we can see that with just a 0.1 millisecond response time we do get a pretty clear image but surprisingly you can compared to the IPS which he has a 1.5 millisecond response time it's not like Leaps and Bounds better as the numbers would suggest what's interesting though is that when we crank up the UFO movement speed so the UFO object is now kind of panning across the screen a bit faster now they start to look pretty similar so even with a 0.1 millisecond great degree response time motion blur at least here on the OLED in the UFO test at least is not perfect especially when you consider how far away it is from the diac plus result on the xowie 360 Hertz where the 0.1 millisecond response time can be noticed though is with ultra slow motion footage so on the left here we have the 360 Hertz Asus and on the right we have the 240 hertz LG and I mean in every single comparison the OLED has almost no ghosting and is like hyper hyper detailed now I will mention we are pixel peeping Ultra slow motion footage here like it's borderline a bit of a meme but you can actually see this in gameplay like the OLED just has this visual quality to it where everything has so much detail and accept even in fast-paced moments now another thing I was really interested to test out here was the input lag you know how fast the display can react to clicks and movement and how fast essentially it can draw a new frame because on one hand it has instant response times but at the same time 240 hertz is not exactly the fastest thing on the market here we're looking at the amount of time it takes for a mouse click to register as a flash on screen so over 150 samples here green is the 360 Hertz Asus and blue is the 240 hertz LG OLED and averaging it all out we can see that there's a pretty small difference but it is a difference nonetheless it is actually the 360 Hertz pg27 that's one millisecond quicker and this is about the difference that you would expect comparing 240 hertz to 360 Hertz interestingly though when both panels are running at 240 hertz the IPS panel on the Asus still seems to respond just a fraction quicker and when I say a fraction I really mean it you know like we're looking at super slow motion footage here captured at over 6 000 frames per second in real time this is not even close to being noticeable but it's still pretty interesting to see now another big difference between these two panels is how bright they can get and unfortunately the new OLED just doesn't get that bright I measured right around 200 nits on a completely white screen which is not that great basically if you set 100 brightness on the LG OLED that translates to about 40 on the Asus pg27 which at Peak brightness can almost reach a blistering 500 nits so look if you're playing in a very bright environment the OLED just isn't a good choice but I would say that for most people it is actually fine especially if you play games with your Shades closed or during the night I personally found 200 nits to be sufficient I will admit during my entire time playing on the monitor I always had it set to 100 so it is something to consider if you need a really bright panel but I think most people's setups will be fine there is one setting that you'll definitely need to disable though and that's the luminance power saving setting essentially this is like an auto dimming feature that is B based off of power consumption it's really weird and super annoying and the monitor won't actually be able to achieve its full brightness in some scenes so just make sure to disable that and you'll be fine now speaking of out of the box settings default configuration when I first powered this monitor on I was shocked at how bad it actually looked like for some reason LG set the default white point to 8500 Kelvin which just looks awful like everything has this blue tint everything is overly cool it just looks so terrible for such a premium display you can easily correct this though just go into the color temperature settings and set it to the setting called C1 that will give you basically a perfect white point at 6500 Kelvin and basically what that means is that whites will be actually white they won't have any kind of warm tint or blue tint it'll be Rock Solid and everything will look perfect I'll also quickly mention the color performance at this point the srgb mode for people who want to use that is very accurate it's just a touch over saturated in some colors but overall still very suitable for color work but of course most of you will want to use the monitor in The Wider gamut modes where you can achieve a massive 95 of DCI P3 coverage now there's something else that I need to mention on this model so there is a little bit strange and that is the sub pixel layout So within each pixel on your display there is a red green and a blue element and usually they are ordered in exactly that Arrangement red then green then blue the new lgo LED on the other hand it's different it's actually red then blue then green now why does this matter why am I even bringing this up it's because text and other elements in Windows look a lot worse than you'd expect with this different subpixel layout so a bit of a comparison of some zoomed in text here at the top we have the 360 Hertz pg27 aqn and the bottom is the new OLED we are zoomed in pretty deep here but this is actually something that you can notice just from a normal viewing distance and during normal use so I would 100 say if you're an online illustrator or designer or maybe you just read a lot of text and documents on your display I would really just recommend avoiding this monitor until there's proper support for this subpixel layout another thing that is affected by this and it's kind of why I noticed it in the first place some elements in games can also just look a touch different like my Crosshair for example in OverWatch 2 has this darker Edge on the left which is not how it looks normally normal 3D rendering though games for example that stuff isn't affected by this at all now the very last thing that I tried out on this monitor was HDR which is something that I'm actually pretty keen on you know truly good HDR can transform game visuals it can take something that looks 2D and turn it into something that you can almost Reach Out And Touch now HDR is not something that I have a lot of kind of in-depth experience testing but what I can say is that the gaming experience is definitely worthwhile like if the games that you play have good HDR support I don't think you'll be disappointed here at all LG claimed that the new OLED can Peak at a thousand nits while in HDR mode so things like gunshots fire bright lights and stuff like that they'll just pop off the screen a lot more than your typical SDR mode HD ER is really something that you can only experience and see properly in person but you can kind of appreciate that extra brightness through a good camera as you can hopefully see here side by side you should be able to see a slight difference which again is a lot more noticeable in person do maternal for example has really good HDR support and this game just really comes to life on a really good HDR display on the new LG OLED it's an absolute blast you've got those Inky blacks you've got that super clear image that 240Hz refresh rate and again that extra pop here and there from the HDR I think this is like a perfect example of what this display looks like at its full potential now there's not much to say about the exterior design it's a pretty basic stand with height swivel and tilt adjustment most of the menu controls are accessed through a small remote which comes in the box and that also includes controlling the RGB lighting which you'll see around the back for those interested in what settings I've been using with this monitor I'll leave those down below in the description but there's only a couple of adjustments to the kind of default gamer one profile but yeah overall you know there are just so many good gaming monitors out at the moment and even between these two it's hard to say that one is just so much better than the other when they do things kind of differently and they have the strong points and whatnot but I will say that the new 27-inch OLED is just kind of different like it's a different experience to what I've had previously especially in a 27 inch form factor I've reviewed a lot of gaming monitors lots of ips monitors and I would almost just kind of put them all in the same bucket after trying something that's kind of as different as this so I think in the simplest terms it's kind of like the 360 Hertz Asus IPS it's a bit more of a smoother experience but then the 240Hz LG is a bit more of a clearer experience like on the OLED everything is just superbly focused everything is hyper detailed you get that really just brilliant image quality but then on the 360 Hertz from Asus you can tell that you are getting more frames one thing I am concerned about though is of course the burn-in you know that's one of the biggest drawbacks of OLED panels the potential for static elements to kind of burn in permanently on your screen that's one of the main reasons why I'll be keeping this on my desk and seeing how bad that can actually get with a lot more aggressive use there are some burn-in safety features automatically built in here though there's an auto sleep function after a few minutes there's also a pixel cleaning feature which happens automatically every now and then when you turn the monitor off hopefully those two things are enough I will say though that you know even next to the OLED the pg-27 is still looking like a really good monitor even at the same price point especially if you don't want to worry about burning you want something that can get way brighter and hey maybe the games you play support higher refresh rates and you kind of want to experience that for that reason you know even after seeing the LG OLED and how impressive it is on multiple fronts I will still be recommending the pg-27 aqn right alongside it I think they're both really really good monitors both are at the kind of one thousand dollar price point as well to me it just really depends on what kind of features you value more and you want to get out of a monitor yeah that's pretty much watch it our links will be down below in the description if you want to check any of these monitors out as always a huge thanks for watching and I'll see you all in the next one

Channel: Optimum Tech

Views: 632,236

Keywords: LG OLED, OLED 27, LG 27GR95QE, LG OLED 240Hz, best 1440p monitor, optimum tech, best gaming monitor, oled gaming monitor, 27GR95QE review

Id: hMzCnEhfB18

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/SnakeDoctr]

One additional note is that OLED panels are actually quite poor (in my opinion) when gaming at anything lower than about 80-90FPS. Even at a locked 60FPS, the near-instantaneous response time of OLED panels results in what appears to be "judder" or "stuttering" while on a traditional LCD panel that would instead appear "blurry" - almost like motion blur.

I much prefer the latter.

At least until we've moved beyond sample & hold technology.

[u/nitrohigito]

The finish on it looks good, but these subpixel bingos are ridiculous. That input lag test was kind of baffling too, 4+ frames of lag is really not what I'd expect from this kind of a setup.

I thought you needed to move the camera along with the ufo sprite btw?

[u/lex_koal]

Yeah, colors look unreal. But somehow it has many drawbacks: sub-pixel layout, brightness, matte finish (although better than other monitors), burn-in, input lag and motion blur are excellent but not as outstanding as I would expect.
Seems like people who waited for the review have made a right call. ALWAYS wait for reviews

[u/Progenitor3]

Not sure how to square this review with what this guy said...

Anyway, I feel like the Optimum review is a bit over the top... "it's 1440p but feels like 4k" or "you're at medium setting but it feels like ultra!"

I wonder when people are gonna start getting over the initial awe of using a big oled monitor for the first time and start giving objective reviews.

[u/Cardiologist_Bright]

Been using this monitor for almost a month. I’m super picky and ocd and the matte is not bad in game. you really only noticed it when you first get the monitor cause you pixel peeping. with that said….it drives me nuts outside of games. Don’t use this monitor for 9-5 job

i put the monitor back in the box to send it back, but i set it back up again a few days ago and was like “meh, this is actually pretty sick. i’m overthinking this matte thing”

1k is a lot, but let’s be real- those of us in the market for this are the enthusiasts and afford to splurge. it’s not end of world when you have to sell it in a year and upgrade to a 4k version or whatever. enjoy your life today, not tomorrow :)

[u/Henreid]

Nice monitor, but I won't be ready to make an investment until some company finally introduces an affordable 32" 4K 120Hz OLED display.

Memo to LG: if you can sell a 42" 4K 120Hz OLED TV for less than $1000, why haven't you offered us a 32" OLED monitor for under $1000? I keep wondering what may be preventing manufacturers from taking the opportunity to fill this completely empty market niche... ???

[u/Carlsgonefishing]

I can’t believe people actually want this to be glossy. I have a glossy oled screen side by side with this monitor and the reflections are so much more extreme.

Edit let me rephrase. I can’t believe how mad people are over a matte coating they haven’t seen in person.

[u/xelu01]

Damn I need it!

[u/zgmk2]

For 1440p gaming, 1k is way too much just for a monitor