XoR_
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2016
- Messages
- 1,568
So at the beginning of this year I found out review of LG 27GN950 and it seemed like almost perfect monitor minus no real HDR (well, it can be eye soaring bright but that looks like all it can do and even this not so much with HDR600 ) and more importantly HDMI 2.1. So I waited for successor LG 27GP950 which due to availability issues I only managed to get it today.
First impressions:
- sRGB works as expected. Colors are pretty much the same as on HP DreamColor LP2480zx. Whitepoint is slightly different but it is probably due to my HP being calibrated 16.5K hours ago and I suspected it to be out of spec by this point.
- HDR works better than expected.
- fastest LCD panel I ever had pleasure experiencing with absolutely no visible RTC errors on "fast" response times at 160Hz.
- "fastest" response time is RTC error-fest
- at 100% brightness (should be 450cd/m2, at least that is what 27gn950 measured on tftcentral) it is surprisingly usable
- ambilight feature works as expected. It is not super bright by any means and LEDs do not switch very fast in actual ambi-light mode. I am not the fan of it and I almost always use ambient light so it is kinda pointless feature for me but if they had to put RGB-LEDs and didn't put them as backlight then I guess making ambient light out of it is the best they could do. I'll probably just use white light mode. Brightness can be changed with the wheel so it can easily be adjusted.
- the DCI-P3 gamut is not as wide as to make any issues with subpixel font rendering noticeable with sRGB emulation so that is good
Now the HDR with 16 zones is pretty much limited by its IPS-eque contrast ratio but surprisingly HDR videos I played do look very nice. The brighter scene the better overall result and outdoors scenes during the day showing sun do look awesome. Space shots like in this video show weakness of such implementation the most. Well, it is gray blacks fest most of the time but when star shows up it doesn't matter because it looks very bright Generally a lot of ambient light is needed to make blacks less jarring and forget about inky blacks and it should be fine.
What is nice is ability to reduce brightness in HDR mode. It might make HDR actually more usable alternative to using monitor at sRGB or DCI-P3 when game thinks it is running in sRGB (at least some games can be played in wide-gamut and extra color saturation does not look too much out of place) because game will use DCI-P3 but show all colors correctly and extended colors will be used only where colors are that saturated. Maybe not, maybe that is terrible idea... this I will definitely test more once I start doing game tests on PC and PS5.
My previous gaming monitor was Acer XB271HK which was 4K 60Hz but with G-Sync module and what I absolutely hated on this monitor (except it being only 60Hz and then 30Hz via HDMI, sic) was that I got eyestrain from it when turning brightness at anything more than about 100cd/m2. It was 250cd/m2 max monitor and at 100% I my eyes were burning. Here I can run desktop at 450cd/m2 just fine. What is interesting is that all other wide color gamut monitors I am able to run very bright also. RGB-LED HP LP2480zx which I use for years now I can easily run at its maximum brightness (250cd/m2) and the brightest monitor except this LG, the Dell U2410 was 400cd/m2 and it was surprisingly very usable. Yet some screens just have irritating light my eyes cannot stand and most of them have W-LEDs... of course
Maybe that is the solution for eyestrain - get monitors designed for very high brightness and then run them at reasonable brightness. Definitely light that monitor creates seems to be main factor.
Now the colors in sRGB mode are very nice and the only issue I see is that in sRGB mode gamma is too low to my liking and my liking is more Rec.709 gamma of 2.4 than sRGB gamma 2.2. For content consumption and especially in dark environment gamma 2.4 should be used. I guess if there was Rec.709 mode then gamma would be how I like. This can be however easily corrected with GPU control panel and this monitor as all good monitors should be able to do can be hardware calibrated including setting arbitrary gamut and gamma on top of white-point. I have not tested this hardware calibration feature but I am afraid my HP branded i1 Display probes will refuse to work. Hopefully not.
Now the last thing to mention is panel speed for gaming. Well, of course the panel is stupendously fast for a LCD. It does 160Hz and has very fast response times and no noticeable input lag. I do not see any RTC artifacts except "fastest" preset but this one is just a gimmick. Maybe it can be useful to make moving enemies more noticeable when camping? Edges of moving objects do become quite noticeable in this mode. It is not even available in sRGB mode so it mostly do not matter.
One thing I tried to immediately test was integer scaling... well with RTX 2070 it might be useful feature, especially for RTX games if I want to keep in monitor VRR range. At 1080p integer scaled to 4K games look very good even if slightly pixelated though nice square pixels themselves look good and they never bothered me. I was forced to use 1080p like that on my previous 4K monitor when playing Cyberpunk with RTX because my GPU didn't quite cut it for DLSS Ultra performance and 1080p just worked better. There is an issue with this idea on this new LG but easily resolvable. Integer scaling option in Nvidia control panel is not available in monitor overclock (160Hz) mode. When switching down to normal 144Hz option is there and monitor can be ran at 1080p with perfectly square pixels. Not such a big issue especially since 1080p would be used when game runs like crap on 2160p so it won't probably hit anywhere close to 144fps on 1080p.
From ergonomic point of view stand of this monitor could be better. For one it doesn't look all that nice and veritcal height regulation is very limited. Stand itself is very plasticky and there is piece of plastic which is supposed to be used for cable management but I would rather not use it because it looks like even looking at it will cause it to break. Otherwise monitor is quite stable so it does its main function. Monitor itself looks good.
Generally not the cheapest monitor ever but for quality that I got I can't complain. Compared to HP LP2480zx it has worse viewing angles but that is no surprise because it is one of rare A-TW monitors. IPS glow is however smaller than my previous Acer monitor. Just enough smaller that I do not see bright patches in the corners from normal viewing distances. And definitely this monitor like I mentioned can be viewed with very high brightness setting which this monitor can also happily do which is one of the things I was most afraid won't be the case when buying it because those kind of issues are not something reviews cover and which was one of the biggest issues of monitor it replaced. With hardware calibration it should be on par with my second monitor (HP LP2480zx) when it comes to ability to have really correct colors while being gaming monitor with 160Hz and no input lag vs 60Hz and 24ms inherent input lag. Even without doing such calibration I am very happy with the image quality.
Main reason why I did not get 27GN950 and waited for GP950 was HDMI 2.1. I did not test it yet with my PS5 but I suppose it should work well. It is not like I can test all HDMI 2.1 features on PS5 just yet. Imho it was worth waiting few months and get more future proofed display. It looks good enough to be usable for next ten to twenty years at least. Not that I will use it for that long but actually it it won't break and I won't sell it there is no reason not to put it to use. That was the main reason for going with HDMI 2.1 display.
Perhaps only complaint is the price... but it was at least not completely ridiculous. I am really happy with the monitor otherwise. It is this rare event in life when you get new display and there is nothing really to complain about. Usually consumer monitors look like made by people who quickly assemble and push product from random parts without even checking how the picture looks on the damn thing... or they do look and make sure there is some breaking flaw
Here quality and features are at level I expect from professional color grading monitor without any FW quirks so far. At least none which I can notice at first glance. BTW. Apparently this monitor has a fan but I do not hear any fan so maybe it goes live at hot summer days when blasting at full HDR for a while. Should not be an issue.
tl;dr
Great colors, eyes not tired from watching it, support next gen consoles, pixels are fast fast!
Do recommend, great display
First impressions:
- sRGB works as expected. Colors are pretty much the same as on HP DreamColor LP2480zx. Whitepoint is slightly different but it is probably due to my HP being calibrated 16.5K hours ago and I suspected it to be out of spec by this point.
- HDR works better than expected.
- fastest LCD panel I ever had pleasure experiencing with absolutely no visible RTC errors on "fast" response times at 160Hz.
- "fastest" response time is RTC error-fest
- at 100% brightness (should be 450cd/m2, at least that is what 27gn950 measured on tftcentral) it is surprisingly usable
- ambilight feature works as expected. It is not super bright by any means and LEDs do not switch very fast in actual ambi-light mode. I am not the fan of it and I almost always use ambient light so it is kinda pointless feature for me but if they had to put RGB-LEDs and didn't put them as backlight then I guess making ambient light out of it is the best they could do. I'll probably just use white light mode. Brightness can be changed with the wheel so it can easily be adjusted.
- the DCI-P3 gamut is not as wide as to make any issues with subpixel font rendering noticeable with sRGB emulation so that is good
Now the HDR with 16 zones is pretty much limited by its IPS-eque contrast ratio but surprisingly HDR videos I played do look very nice. The brighter scene the better overall result and outdoors scenes during the day showing sun do look awesome. Space shots like in this video show weakness of such implementation the most. Well, it is gray blacks fest most of the time but when star shows up it doesn't matter because it looks very bright Generally a lot of ambient light is needed to make blacks less jarring and forget about inky blacks and it should be fine.
What is nice is ability to reduce brightness in HDR mode. It might make HDR actually more usable alternative to using monitor at sRGB or DCI-P3 when game thinks it is running in sRGB (at least some games can be played in wide-gamut and extra color saturation does not look too much out of place) because game will use DCI-P3 but show all colors correctly and extended colors will be used only where colors are that saturated. Maybe not, maybe that is terrible idea... this I will definitely test more once I start doing game tests on PC and PS5.
My previous gaming monitor was Acer XB271HK which was 4K 60Hz but with G-Sync module and what I absolutely hated on this monitor (except it being only 60Hz and then 30Hz via HDMI, sic) was that I got eyestrain from it when turning brightness at anything more than about 100cd/m2. It was 250cd/m2 max monitor and at 100% I my eyes were burning. Here I can run desktop at 450cd/m2 just fine. What is interesting is that all other wide color gamut monitors I am able to run very bright also. RGB-LED HP LP2480zx which I use for years now I can easily run at its maximum brightness (250cd/m2) and the brightest monitor except this LG, the Dell U2410 was 400cd/m2 and it was surprisingly very usable. Yet some screens just have irritating light my eyes cannot stand and most of them have W-LEDs... of course
Maybe that is the solution for eyestrain - get monitors designed for very high brightness and then run them at reasonable brightness. Definitely light that monitor creates seems to be main factor.
Now the colors in sRGB mode are very nice and the only issue I see is that in sRGB mode gamma is too low to my liking and my liking is more Rec.709 gamma of 2.4 than sRGB gamma 2.2. For content consumption and especially in dark environment gamma 2.4 should be used. I guess if there was Rec.709 mode then gamma would be how I like. This can be however easily corrected with GPU control panel and this monitor as all good monitors should be able to do can be hardware calibrated including setting arbitrary gamut and gamma on top of white-point. I have not tested this hardware calibration feature but I am afraid my HP branded i1 Display probes will refuse to work. Hopefully not.
Now the last thing to mention is panel speed for gaming. Well, of course the panel is stupendously fast for a LCD. It does 160Hz and has very fast response times and no noticeable input lag. I do not see any RTC artifacts except "fastest" preset but this one is just a gimmick. Maybe it can be useful to make moving enemies more noticeable when camping? Edges of moving objects do become quite noticeable in this mode. It is not even available in sRGB mode so it mostly do not matter.
One thing I tried to immediately test was integer scaling... well with RTX 2070 it might be useful feature, especially for RTX games if I want to keep in monitor VRR range. At 1080p integer scaled to 4K games look very good even if slightly pixelated though nice square pixels themselves look good and they never bothered me. I was forced to use 1080p like that on my previous 4K monitor when playing Cyberpunk with RTX because my GPU didn't quite cut it for DLSS Ultra performance and 1080p just worked better. There is an issue with this idea on this new LG but easily resolvable. Integer scaling option in Nvidia control panel is not available in monitor overclock (160Hz) mode. When switching down to normal 144Hz option is there and monitor can be ran at 1080p with perfectly square pixels. Not such a big issue especially since 1080p would be used when game runs like crap on 2160p so it won't probably hit anywhere close to 144fps on 1080p.
From ergonomic point of view stand of this monitor could be better. For one it doesn't look all that nice and veritcal height regulation is very limited. Stand itself is very plasticky and there is piece of plastic which is supposed to be used for cable management but I would rather not use it because it looks like even looking at it will cause it to break. Otherwise monitor is quite stable so it does its main function. Monitor itself looks good.
Generally not the cheapest monitor ever but for quality that I got I can't complain. Compared to HP LP2480zx it has worse viewing angles but that is no surprise because it is one of rare A-TW monitors. IPS glow is however smaller than my previous Acer monitor. Just enough smaller that I do not see bright patches in the corners from normal viewing distances. And definitely this monitor like I mentioned can be viewed with very high brightness setting which this monitor can also happily do which is one of the things I was most afraid won't be the case when buying it because those kind of issues are not something reviews cover and which was one of the biggest issues of monitor it replaced. With hardware calibration it should be on par with my second monitor (HP LP2480zx) when it comes to ability to have really correct colors while being gaming monitor with 160Hz and no input lag vs 60Hz and 24ms inherent input lag. Even without doing such calibration I am very happy with the image quality.
Main reason why I did not get 27GN950 and waited for GP950 was HDMI 2.1. I did not test it yet with my PS5 but I suppose it should work well. It is not like I can test all HDMI 2.1 features on PS5 just yet. Imho it was worth waiting few months and get more future proofed display. It looks good enough to be usable for next ten to twenty years at least. Not that I will use it for that long but actually it it won't break and I won't sell it there is no reason not to put it to use. That was the main reason for going with HDMI 2.1 display.
Perhaps only complaint is the price... but it was at least not completely ridiculous. I am really happy with the monitor otherwise. It is this rare event in life when you get new display and there is nothing really to complain about. Usually consumer monitors look like made by people who quickly assemble and push product from random parts without even checking how the picture looks on the damn thing... or they do look and make sure there is some breaking flaw
Here quality and features are at level I expect from professional color grading monitor without any FW quirks so far. At least none which I can notice at first glance. BTW. Apparently this monitor has a fan but I do not hear any fan so maybe it goes live at hot summer days when blasting at full HDR for a while. Should not be an issue.
tl;dr
Great colors, eyes not tired from watching it, support next gen consoles, pixels are fast fast!
Do recommend, great display