- [Linus] A few months ago Samsung Display gave us an
early look at their unreleased Quantum Dot OLED TVs and gaming monitors. And we made a video telling
you guys how blown away we were by the image quality. Except there was one small problem: that video was sponsored. So many of you accused us of
being overly enthusiastic. Well, guess what? This right here is the
Alien ware AW3423DW. It's a 175 Hertz. It's got HDR and it's equipped with a brand new Quantum Dot OLED panel
from Samsung Display. And because James was the
one who did that last video I get to experience this tech in the flesh for my very first time, right in front of all of you. And today, there's no Samsung Display
sponsorship to be found, because this video is
sponsored by Bit defender. Bit defender Total Security,
is a complete solution to protect your Windows, macOS,
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at the link down below. (upbeat music) There's no time to
waste, so I'm all set up on this chair that we
literally found in the alley. I'm at the new house so there's no furniture here, yet. And we are gonna game on this bad boy. What do we got for
graphics horsepower here? - [Plouffe] We got 3090. - A 3090, perfect. Oh, should we talk about specs at all? - [Plouffe] Nah, nah, nah
you just gotta game on it. - All right. I'm gonna try it. (dramatic music) I've been so excited to try these ever since James came back
from the early sneak peak. The first thing I'm gonna do is change it from HDR 400 true black, which is what you'd see
a on a typical OLED, to HDR peak 1000. That's right. Theoretically, it has all
the advantages of OLED which means perfect blacks, but with a thousand peak brightness. We're gonna set the game to 3440 X 1440, which is the native
resolution of this panel, but while we're in the menu, you guys probably notice
something, G-SYNC is enabled and this isn't just regular G-SYNC, this is G-SYNC ultimate. So, that means we can have HDR and G-SYNC running at the same time. All the bells and whistles. Oh, I can already tell HDR is
working even just in the menu. - It looks so good, oh my God. - Here we go, here we go. This is not as glinted and HDR, as I would've expected. Yeah, just normally you'd
see like really eye searing like specular highlights on
the car and stuff like that, it's just not that. Okay, this shaded house
with the lit sky behind it is like kind of a crazy amount of dynamic range here. Like my eyes need to adjust to look from one part of
the scene to the other. That's insane, there's still
a lot of detail in here. Like when I look up into the sky with the sun behind it I'm like, oo ooh, and then I look over here, it's funny. It really depends how the
game is mastered in HDR. It seems like in Forza, they were really going for a more muted, but realistic HDR experience. It is crazy how
photorealistic this game looks on an accurate display. This thing will do 99.3% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, and out of the factory, we measured just a Delta E of two in creator mode using Cal men. So that's accurate enough for
pretty much professional work on a gaming display. Now we're in game mode right
now is not creator mode because we wanna run it in HDR 1000. But I was surprised at how not overdone Samsung
made their game mode. Usually Samsung is the king
of just Ridiculous vibrancy. This looks great. (Sacrifice Halo theme song) How sure are you that the game
supports HDR, Microsoft hides HDR under screen calibration. Okay. We can decide how
HDR we're going here. - 100% Well, yeah, I think so. - Yeah, crank it! - Yeah. - Okay. This looks freaking awesome. - Oh man. Love it. I mean, it won't make
me good at video games but boy does it ever look good? - Wow. I do not see any
discernible color shift. - That is Insane. It's more like a, like
looking at a picture almost. Like obviously it's self-emissive, right? Like it's illuminated but you could forget you're
looking at a monitor. Unreal. It just looks awesome. Like what else is there to say effects and explosions look awesome. Of course we've seen super
color accurate displays in the past that are totally
unsuitable for gaming but that is not the case here. One of the other big advantages of Oled is lightning fast
pixel response times. And that's still true here. Samsung claims 0.1
milliseconds, gray to gray. And I can't see any
discernible motion blur even when whipping the camera around. That's freaking awesome. Also pixel response time is
only part of the calculation. You also need to factor in
how much input leg there is from the displays electronics. And we managed about 16 milliseconds from click to photon with our Nvidia Ldat. Which is up there with
the best gaming displays. - It's so responsive. It's just, what are the compromises? What are the compromises? - It does it all. - Find me one. - That was a lie. - COST! - Honestly, like the clarity feels almost strobing clear to me. Like as I'm panning around,
there's just no blur. Now we should talk about Samsung's bar brightness
claims for a little bit here. We did manage to hit
their claimed 1000 nits of peak brightness in a 1% or 2% window which doesn't sound like a
lot, but in a scene like this would you really have more than 1% or 2% of the screen that would
actually be at peak brightness. You wouldn't even wanna
look at something that's at a thousand nits across
the entire display. So it does fall off. You see about 800 nits
peak brightness at 10%. And then once you make your
way, all the way to full screen it sits in the neighborhood of 280 nits which is a lot for this
much of your field of view. It's very respectable compared
to other devices out there. And when you factor in that
it's got perfect blacks. The perceived dynamic
range is extremely high. Man. Look at this suit, all
glow and yellow and stuff. Ah, Jake, are you ordering one right now? - Brother, look. (Laughing) - Here. Get your shield back. Where's your shield? Does it recharge? Yeah, there we go. There we go. Watch this. Ah, looks so good. - Oh, it's so crazy. Okay. Sorry. I'm supposed to try a different game now. Ah this game looks so good. Like Forza had that realism
kind of, you know, HDR effect but this is like, whoa fantasy environment, HDR, you
know, it's just different. It hits different (Resident evil) - All right. We're in a much darker scene now but this is a really
good opportunity to talk about one of the big benefits of QD Oled. Which is much better
representations of red and yellow. Which are traditionally
really difficult to handle. And you come, man, it's
gonna be hard to capture this on camera, through your monitor. But I, I tell you guys, the
gold doesn't look yellow. Like gold tends to look
on a normal display. It looks, it looks gold. It looks shiny. That is, I, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. - Right? Shoot. - And I should shoot it. Apparently. - That was so cool. - The thing about HDR is it's not about just more FPSs, right? Which is what we think about in terms of what makes
something better for gaming. It's about increasing the immersiveness and when a game is mastered well in HDR it's just so much more realistic looking. This looks and feels like
I'm standing in the room. I have actually I have a confession to
make gamer confession. I have never played an RE game. - What? - Disappointed! - Like your eyes need to adjust
to perceive the difference. It doesn't let you jump up ladders. This is one of those kinds of games. Something to note though,
is that our RTX 3090 is working pretty freaking hard
to make this look this good. We could even benefit
from a 3090 TI upgrade. Get subscribed by the way because we do have a
review of that coming. Here we go. I missed one of them. Shoot. - Okay. Are we close? - Yeah. - Oh shoot that's not what I meant to do. - Oh, that's really close. Isn't it? - Yeah, yeah, yeah - No stop. - I can't get rid of the menu. So we're in filmmaker mode on the LGTV. Yeah you lose a ton of the detail here. It's all there. To be
clear LGOLEDS this is a C1, great viewing angles compared to anything that we had seen
before, but this is next level. It doesn't matter where
you are in the room. Man, When are the TVs with this coming? I definitely wanna see a TV with a proper filmmaker
mode with this display tech. I feel like it could be even better. Okay. Until now we've talked about some of the reasons
the AW3423DW looks so good but I'm sure you guys want more depth. It starts with the QD OLED
panel from Samsung display which works very differently
from a typical white OLED or W OLED panel by starting
with blue light instead of white then they filter that blue light with inkjet printed quantum dots. Hence the QD in QD OLED. We've got another video
explaining this more in depth that you can check out here but basically by starting
with a high frequency wave like blue across the entire panel and then stepping that light
down into red green or anything in between through quantum
dots, you lose very little light in contrast to the current W OLED method. Which filters colors rather
than converting them. And because there's no white sub pixel, colors don't get washed out when you're trying to
make them look brighter. And because we're being more
efficient and not losing light tO color filters, we're also
not driving the panel as hard. So the Alien ware QU OLDED
here does have a manual and an automatic pixel
or panel refresher option but the tech has come so far that we're just not
anywhere near as afraid of burning as we used to be. On top of that, Dell is so
confident in Samsung's panels that they're offering
a three year warranty. That includes burning. Now we're still waiting for
some official statements from Samsung about results
from factory testing but confidence is pretty high
that you can finally leave up your UI during a marathon
gaming session and not worry about it sticking around when
it's time to watch a movie as for the rest of the
monitor, you can put it either on the stand or on a standard base mount. And it's got a two-one white and black plastic case with
RGB lighting on the back. There's lots of IO, including
this is really cool. Two USB ports on the bottom making them way easier to
reach than most monitors. And there's an navigation
nipple down there for the onscreen display, which has tons of handy options and
is really easy to use. It's got decent cable management through the stand and while the inner and outer bezel leaves a
little bit to be desired. Honestly, I immediately
stop noticing as soon as there was content up on the screen there's also an acceptable level of pan swiveling tilt with
the included stand meaning that Alien ware might
have just made almost every other ultra wide
1440 P monitor irrelevant especially given the price. It's $1299 us which is a lot of money. But right now, if you look for similar specs with an IPS
panel, rather than a QD OLED you're not gonna find many at
significantly cheaper prices. This 34 inch ultra gear from LG, $1250. There's a cheaper ultra gear,
but it has way worse HDR. Uses regular IPS instead of now IPS. And it's only G-sync compatible not G-sync ultimate and that
one's still a thousand dollars. So you have to ask yourself
is QD OLED worth spending an extra 300 bucks. It's not gonna be in
everyone's budget, but we think that if you're already in
that kind of price range the answer is most definitely yes. And we're gonna have this and these other displays
linked down below. So you can make your own decision later. Now, part of the reason the price is not in the several thousand
dollars category is the ability to get so many panels of this size from one
sheet of mother glass. That's the name for the giant slabs of glass that TVs and
monitors are cut from. We don't know exactly what
Samsung display is doing but at 2.5 by 2.2 meters you can fit 18 of this on a single sheet. Instead of trying to cut a
few out of the leftover glass from larger displays, like 75 inch TVs. Now Samsung is reporting some low yields on this tech as low as 30%. But since so many screens are
being cut from a single sheet one small defect doesn't necessarily mean that one six of your entire
sheet of is now garbage. And as time goes on and the yield rate increases a nice thing about it being so low
is that there's a lot of room for improvement. So the price should
come down even further. Speaking of great prices. Check out our new team red LTT store, pillow,
CPU, pill, lots of fun. So it seems like an easy answer. If you're shopping for a
display, good product, good price all things considered. So this is what you buy right? Well, yes, but also no this is the first QD OLED
gaming monitor on the market. And while it seems great you're always taking a bit
of a risk with new tech. There's also no real competition yet. And there are sure to be a plethora of QD OLED options in the
not so distant future. We could see better prices or I mean, who knows maybe you just don't really
like the design of the stand or the housing that Alien
ware has given us here. So jumping in now honestly
looks like a goodbye to me but there are bound to be
more options to choose from if you have a bit of patience. As for me, my C10 is two
generations old at this point. So, uh, woo. This is looking like
a pretty good upgrade. All I need to do is make some money by telling you about
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that's privacy.com/linus. If you guys like this video but you still aren't sure about QDOLED. You can check out the Samsung just made
everything else obsolete video. It was sponsored by Samsung but the title really does say it all. Guys. This is really cool. Display tech, no Samsung
money insight today.
I can't believe I'm posting this, this is not a Linus Tech tips showcase.
They use the term showcase for sponsored videos where they go over the product.
IE https://youtu.be/tURZaUyUoOM https://youtu.be/9E2kZqsXp4A https://youtu.be/q7ZYdLCzCJM
THIS video is NOT a showcase, as it's not a sponsored video.
https://youtu.be/65SvTs_b3RE?t=376
I had a pretty good giggle at the brightness section. They should've at least rolled some B-roll with the shades down so a 280nit monitor wasn't struggling against sunlight the entire time. Even something capable of 500nits 100% window like the PG27UQ/X27 would struggle in that environment.
Techtesters review noted that the HDMI ports are 2.0, and DP is 1.4, so you can only run this monitor at 175 Hz in 8 bit color mode. Max for 10bit is 144Hz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzNJ31qeT_I
So this basically invalidates all other monitors at that form factor unless I'm missing something.
HDR content is mastered for dimly lit rooms. Doing this showcase in the window room seems like a bad scenario for any meaningful comparison, if the intended accuracy of shown content is what you're looking for.
Seems like LTT's team did measurements ahead of time, but Linus' first look in such an environment is kind of a worst case scenario for inspecting HDR content.
Will there be other panel sizes coming soon?
How big are the pixels on a 34" UW 1400p compared to the standard (and IMO a bit chunky) 24" 1080p?
Hopefully they release a 42" 4K version some time. Would love to see an alternative to the LG C2.
Didn't he use an OLED TV as a daily driver for months?
Seems overly excited about HDR/True blacks for someone that has already has months of experience with a similar type of technology. Maybe it's just for the camera, but it's really unnecessary.
Will be interesting to see a similar monitor in 4K with a standard aspect ratio. Right now the only alternative is to wait for the 42'' LG C2 coming out soon.