A lot of gamers have been waiting a long time for 27″– 32″ sized high refresh rate OLED gaming monitors and for most of them, the wait is now finally over with the LG UltraGear 27GR95QE-B! Image Quality The main downside of OLED panels is the risk of permanent image burn-in and temporary image retention. Image retention, or burn-in is still a prevalent issue with OLED displays despite the resilience of newer panels. As such, some care will need to be taken to maintain optimal image quality on the 27GR95QE. While I wouldn’t go to the extent of baby-ing it all the time, leaving static images on the screen for extended periods of time could result in some burn-in issues. If you are a heavy Windows user, you might want to set the taskbar to auto-hide, and if you are watching lots of sports, or playing a game with a lot of static HUD elements, you might want to give the screen a break now and then with other kinds of content so the OLEDs don’t ‘set in’ on a particular color. LG 27UL650 Review – 4K IPS Monitor with FreeSync and HDR The LG 27UL650 is the next 4K monitor in line to the well-loved 27UK650 which provided accurate color and excellent… One attractive aspect of this monitor is its size since every other OLED display that’s available is usually gigantic. This model has a 27-inch diagonal, so it should fit neatly with your peripherals if you have a standard-sized desk. It’s also lightweight at 16.2 pounds, so you can easily bring it to LAN parties or gaming events.

There are then two cleaning cycles, “image cleaning” which takes 10 mins to run, and “pixel cleaning” which will take 1 minute. It’s the “image cleaning” that is the more common and frequent minor cleaning cycle, despite being the longer to complete. The screen will prompt you to run these periodically anyway after certain amounts of usage time (4 hours of use for image cleaning and 500 hours of use for pixel cleaning), and will run the cycle when the screen is in standby so as not to disrupt your usage. With over a week of screen time with LG’s new 27” OLED monitor, I can confidently say that this is a stellar product, and absolutely is the upgrade one should consider. Of course, OLED panels do come with one major caveat, and that is the less than average standard brightness, which could struggle in showing bright images under well-lit conditions. Design and Features We can also compare the motion clarity of the 27GR95QE here against some 360Hz LCD screens we’ve reviewed. You can see that actually despite the lower refresh rate (by 33%) the motion clarity is very similar here from the 240Hz OLED panel. There is a ratio of approximately 1.5:1 when it comes to motion clarity between an OLED screen and an LCD screen, thanks to the near-instant response times. So you get a motion clarity in practice beyond what you might expect from the refresh rate number. We have compared the LG against two 360Hz screens here.

You can see that the targets had been closely matched after this process. This is a further “validation” process you can run which takes 3 minutes to complete and will produce a more thorough report, including one you can save as a PDF if you want:

Like most OLED panels, the display has extremely thin bezels all around, and the extra chin at the bottom is only to accommodate the IR blaster for the included remote control. Speaking of which, yes the monitor does come with a remote control, which might be odd at first thought because why would a 27” screen require that? But there is a good reason for it - there is not much space to fit the OSD menu buttons anywhere on the monitor. The panel is extremely thin, so that’s out of the question, and the bottom of the display is allocated to exhaust (which is extremely important for OLED technology) with space for just the power button. Hence, the OSD duties are relegated to the remote control, so you might want to keep it at a reaching distance at all times. The performance is very similar in all other modes except for ‘Vivid’, which can reach up to ~400-nits for 25% and smaller white window sizes, but drops to ~200-nits at around 50%, and down to ~130-nits at 75% – 100%. Therefore, we don’t recommend using the Vivid mode in SDR unless playing games or watching videos as the jumps in brightness will be annoying during everyday use. It also has a too high color temperature, resulting in a bluish tint. SDRThis is also the first sensible monitor-sized OLED panel released (with a high refresh rate above 175Hz which was the previous max) and is bound to attract a lot of interest. It’s 27″ panel (well, 26.5″ to be precise) offers a common 2560 x 1440 resolution, a wide colour gamut with 98.5% DCI-P3 coverage quoted, and even support for hardware calibration. Being OLED it’s well placed to handle HDR content with its per-pixel dimming, and it has a quoted 1000 nits peak brightness spec. This is made possible through the use of LG.Display’s latest generation “META” OLED technology, including MLA (Micro Lens Array), which you can read a lot more about here if you’re interested. The LG 27GR95QE was a really interesting screen to test, being the first super-high refresh rate OLED monitor released to market, and the first OLED gaming monitor in a smaller and common size and form factor. There’s no doubt the OLED panel can offer some impressive and excellent performance in many areas, although it’s not perfect if you’re after a multi-purpose monitor, and struggles a little in some areas it should do better. Anyway the process itself is nice and easy to use and the results, as reported by the software based on the device you’re using look very good. Keep in mind that the calibration will only be as good as the device you’re using, but the same could be said for software profiling anyway. There’s no options in the software to use a “correction matrix” or to profile your meter against a reference device, so the accuracy might not be as good as software where that’s possible – like Calman Ultimate for instance which includes a correction matrix for WOLED panels. However, this is free software from LG, and the results will be better and more practical than software profiling, so it’s great to see it included. You can of course calibrate the other preset mode to different targets if you want. It’s a shame there’s no calibration support for HDR though. Brightness and Contrast

When you enable an HDR input source you are left with a few available preset modes in the menu – Gamer 1, Gamer 2, FPS, RTS and Vivid. Most other picture related settings are greyed out, but brightness remains available in case you wanted to turn that down at all, and sharpness too in case you wanted to change that for gaming and movie viewing. The default 100% brightness setting is optimal for maintaining the highest possible peak brightness in HDR content. The ‘Screen move’ setting shifts the pixels a bit from time to time if you enable it, and will be familiar to anyone who has used an OLED TV before. Personally I find these features annoying for desktop and general use where you might notice the screen move a bit, but for gaming and multimedia you’d be hard pressed to notice it. But then again, it’s of less value for those kind of dynamic uses anyway. To help mitigate the risk of image retention and burn in, you might want to have this turned on but at least LG give you the option to turn it off as well. The pixels have been “over-provisioned” on this screen, so while the image shifts a bit by a few pixels, you never lose any of the actual image off the edges. There is no explanation of what the 4 different modes do in the user manual, so we have no idea how they differ. We tried a couple of them and found the occasional shifting of the image annoying for desktop use personally. But via the remote control, the main menu has a reasonable range of options to play with. There’s a wide range of preset modes you can select from and customise, including two hardware calibrated modes if you have a compatible calibration device. Peak brightness in this default mode reached a maximum of 609 nits in our tests, and that was on a 10% APL window. It was also at approximately that brightness for smaller APL window sizes, but sadly didn’t reach higher, and certainly nowhere near the spec of 1000 nits from LG. We will examine other modes and whether you can get higher peak brightness in a moment. At a full white windows (100% APL) the sustained brightness was only 141 nits, which was quite a bit lower than a 100% window in SDR for some reason (~192 nits). We would have liked to have seen better HDR brightness here really. Newer firmware April 2023– no change to brightnessWith some simple adjustments to the brightness control, contrast and RGB balance, we had achieved a significantly better result in the ‘Gamer 1’ mode. The main benefit was that we’d corrected the RGB balance, and now had a pretty consistent greyscale colour temp, and a white point very close to our target at 6553K. The screen no longer looked bluish, and this in turn improved the greyscale accuracy hugely, now down to dE 1.4 average. This confirms the measured results. Note that the highest colour error is in red, which is what we’d seen after software profiling too as the screen seems to struggle with that pure 100% red colour. At 27 inches, the pixel density is excellent on the UltraGear OLED 27. Text looks super sharp, and images look vibrant thanks to the OLED panel. You’re spending more for fewer pixels, but that’s not really important once you sit down and look at the monitor. Jacob Roach / Digital Trends / Digital Trends

And that color is vibrant. I measured 100% coverage of the sRGB color space, as well as 97% coverage of DCI-P3. Color accuracy was excellent out of the box, too, with a color error of 1.5 (less than 2 is ideal for video and photo editing). You could easily jump in and start editing a video on the UltraGear OLED 27 without any adjustments to the color. On the Xbox Series X there is also a 1440p setting which would have been better to prioritise refresh rate again. However, that mode annoyingly cannot support HDR from the console, and so if you are playing an HDR capable game (and most are nowadays) you would be better running at 4K output to the screen, where HDR is then supported from the console.In our original testing only the ‘vivid’ mode showed any real improvement in HDR peak brightness, reaching up to 792 nits, but only at the expense of an overly colour colour temp, now measured at 9252K. Even this wasn’t reaching the 1000 nits advertised, and we have no idea where that spec came from really. We couldn’t achieve it from our testing. As we said above, the newer April 2023 firmware made some adjustments to the Gamer 2 preset mode which we have added to the table above, making that much cooler now and reaching 882 nits max, but at ~8900K colour temp. Even this “cheat mode” didn’t help it reach the advertised 1000 nits. I’ve never encountered a monitor that makes perfect sense like the UltraGear OLED 27 does. It doesn’t always hold up on the spec sheet, but sitting down in front of the monitor consistently reinforced one idea: this is one of the best gaming experiences you can have right now. The 27GR95QE boasts 2560x1440 resolution, 240Hz refresh rate, and 0.03ms response time. The screen covers 100% sRGB and 98% DCI-P3, while offering it at 200 cd/m2 standard brightness with infinite contrast ratio (thanks to the OLED technology). Note: we turned off “Smart Energy Saving” from the OSD menu which could otherwise impact screen brightness.