PC gaming monitors that have hardware calibration? 32" or 27"

RJ_ds

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As the title says, i'm looking for any gaming monitors that have an internal LUT and can be hardware calibrated. I thought the MSI creator might, but it does not hardware calibrate. I hear there's a benQ or gigabyte model that can be hardware calibrated but I cant find them. Anyone know of any?
 
Hardware Cal. are likley to come in higher end design monitors, not "gaming" monitors. Gaming monitors are high Mhz and low response time usually sacrificing colour quality.
 
LG 27GN950 and newer 27GP950 - which is the same monitor but with HDMI 2.1 so 120Hz VRR - have hardware calibration. Those are gaming monitors with 3840x2160 144Hz and have OC option for 160Hz.

I got LG 27GP950 recently and while I have not done hardware calibration yet on it I can confirm it is pretty great gaming monitor. Very fast IPS panel with no perceivable input lag and default sRGB mode works well out of the box. The same modes and their settings are available between DP and HDMI inputs and in all modes you can change backlight brightness, even in HDR mode.

BTW. Using DP port you get 4K 10-bit at 95Hz without DSC and up to 160Hz with DSC, also at 10-bit. This might be relevant should you fear that DSC is no good for color accuracy.
I have not yet seen how DSC affect colors and I cannot see any obvious side-effects of this compression. All typical killer sample images look ok, no issues with gradients or anything like that. The option to drop to 95Hz and not use DSC is however there so that should be fine.
With HDMI 2.1 model like mine you should get 120Hz 10-bit but since I do not have HDMI 2.1 GPU I cannot confirm that. Playstation 5 works fine at 120Hz as far as I can tell.
 
LG 27GN950 and newer 27GP950 - which is the same monitor but with HDMI 2.1 so 120Hz VRR - have hardware calibration. Those are gaming monitors with 3840x2160 144Hz and have OC option for 160Hz.

I got LG 27GP950 recently and while I have not done hardware calibration yet on it I can confirm it is pretty great gaming monitor. Very fast IPS panel with no perceivable input lag and default sRGB mode works well out of the box. The same modes and their settings are available between DP and HDMI inputs and in all modes you can change backlight brightness, even in HDR mode.

BTW. Using DP port you get 4K 10-bit at 95Hz without DSC and up to 160Hz with DSC, also at 10-bit. This might be relevant should you fear that DSC is no good for color accuracy.
I have not yet seen how DSC affect colors and I cannot see any obvious side-effects of this compression. All typical killer sample images look ok, no issues with gradients or anything like that. The option to drop to 95Hz and not use DSC is however there so that should be fine.
With HDMI 2.1 model like mine you should get 120Hz 10-bit but since I do not have HDMI 2.1 GPU I cannot confirm that. Playstation 5 works fine at 120Hz as far as I can tell.
Thanks! That helps quite a bit. I understand there's a 32" version of thiat model as well, if it also has hardware calibration, i'll take a deeper look. I assume these monitors are wide gamut (most are nowadays). Have you done any testing at 60hz, do you see any ghosting if you have?
 
Thanks! That helps quite a bit. I understand there's a 32" version of thiat model as well, if it also has hardware calibration, i'll take a deeper look. I assume these monitors are wide gamut (most are nowadays). Have you done any testing at 60hz, do you see any ghosting if you have?
I am not aware of 32" version of exactly this monitor but I also didn't look for one. 27" 16:9 fits nicely next to 24" 16:10 as it is pretty much the same height.

Monitor is wide gamut and this is a good thing. Wide gamut monitors are better for sRGB color space than sRGB monitors, especially if you have hardware calibration with gamut emulation. Also unlike something from AUO the panels that LG makes, at least for their premium products, are pretty great when it comes to overall presentation of colors and eye comfort. I did have panels which had proper color saturation and hues but still they looked like they had some kind of cast blue-yellow cast and my eyes hurt from watching at them. Not such thing here, screen is actually pretty comfortable at 200-300cd/m2 and even at 100% given enough ambient light it can be used just fine in games. Which for HDR is kinda necessary anyways :)

As for gaming performance I play at 60Hz a lot because I use the monitor with PS5.
The idea was to have 120Hz VRR rather than use 60Hz but unfortunately 60fps games run at 60Hz. BTW. Running around 60fps in VRR gives similar results as 60Hz mode when it comes to overdrive stuff.
This LG monitor does have a tad big higher overdrive settings than I would prefer it to have and it is locked at 'fast' overdrive at any mode other than two gamer modes. Overall however not a deal breaker for me because in the end it is this artifacting that visually removes blur. In gamer mode I was actually not sure what setting to use. Pixel peeping suggested 'normal' (free from artifacts) mode is better but then sample and hold blur seemed to be more noticeable than in 'fast' which felt overall much less blurry. In the end I do not think this is a very big issue.

The real issue here is lack of choice which is blocked. I wrote email to LG support regarding this but I did it not long before writing this post so no response yet. Even if they insisted to lock it the default should be 'normal' overdrive which doesn't have any visible artifacting rather than 'fast' which does and if it was 'normal' then I could just say 'no, it does not, it is perfect!'. This would be however the only issue I noticed with this monitor and not really a big issue for me given I could not notice any actually bad effects that overdrive can have. Like I had two monitors which when overdrive was enabled you could see banding on skin tones and a kind of sharp edges that made me have to disable overdrive completely for videos. Here it is making image very slightly sharper, like some kind of sharpen mask that is dynamically applied. In the 'faster' setting it is much more visible and even at 120/144/160Hz. Surprisingly videos, like 24/25/30fps videos look completely normal except impression that I suddenly notice every single change on the screen. Maybe this mode would be useful for competitive gaming due to this effect of noticing changes... not sure but definitely it made LG claim it is 1ms which is nonsense. It is fast panel but more like 4-5ms which is already plenty fast.

I wrote more impression in this topic: https://hardforum.com/threads/lg-27gp950-160hz-4k-hdmi-2-1.2012653/
Any updates regarding LG support I will post there not to flood this topic with irrelevant stuff :)
 
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