Copped a new monitor.....

[Steve]

I came into a bit of money recently (just enough to buy this, lol), so I decided to treat myself to a new monitor, an LG UltraGear 27GP950: -

It's one of the few monitors that has HDMI 2.1, so it can do 4K and 144Hz at the same time, plus it has all of the other features you'd want for gaming like FreeSync, HDR etc.

It has a ring of LED lights on the back, which I thought I wouldn't care about at all, but I really like the way it lights up the walls behind it in a dark room. You can change the colours and brightness, and on PC, you can set it so the colour changes to match what's on screen.

[watzz]

Sweet!

[JHouse]

That's beautiful. I want one for my makeshift studio.

[djdiggla]

Thats badass. Those backlights look cool. Probably help with eye fatigue too I'd guess. Did it come with that arm or did you already have that?

[Steve]

17 minutes ago, djdiggla said:

Thats badass. Those backlights look cool. Probably help with eye fatigue too I'd guess. Did it come with that arm or did you already have that?

I've had the arm for about 10 years. It's an Ergotron LX. It's really good quality and has a bunch of adjustment options. You can run the cables through the actual arm pieces, which would look cleaner, but cos I need them to go down through a hole in the worktop, I couldn't really do that. I didn't get the monitor arm until after I'd already drilled the hole for the cables, but if I was starting over I'd drill it in front of where the base of the arm is.

[scottie(the)goonie]

What did that set you back over there?

[Steve]

Just now, scottie(the)goonie said:

What did that set you back over there?

£750, so a bit over a grand in your money.

[scottie(the)goonie]

1 minute ago, Steve said:

£750, so a bit over a grand in your money.

Looks good.  I purchased an 34" (1440p/100hz) ultrawide back in 2017 (first generation of these things) and I regret not waiting a year for LG's version which had 120hz and much better color.  LG makes good stuff.

[Steve]

It sucks that monitors are so behind TVs, but it's market forces I guess. I'd love a 27"-32" OLED!

[scottie(the)goonie]

1 hour ago, Steve said:

It sucks that monitors are so behind TVs, but it's market forces I guess. I'd love a 27"-32" OLED!

I feel you.  I have a LG C9 OLED and it made me realize just how poor the color and contrast is on my ultrawide.  But for gaming, I love the ultrawide so I'm not mad at that.

I briefly tried using my 55" OLED as a computer monitor, not worth it.  Even the 48" version is probably too big.  32"-38" OLED would be perfect.

[Steve]

Now that I've had this for a couple of weeks, I'd say these are the only real negatives: -

When you turn it on, or when it wakes from sleep, it does a short light show (just a few seconds) with the LED ring on the back. It remembers your last setting for that ring, which it reverts to when that light show is over, but it would be nice if you could disable the light show altogether. It's something they could easily fix in a firmware update.

I wish it had a remote. Even a basic one would be fine. There are only 2 controls on it, both of which are on the bottom - a little joystick that you use for most settings, and a scroll wheel that's used for turning the headphone volume up/down or changing the brightness of the LED lights. I switch inputs a lot cos I'm switching from PC to Xbox and vice versa, so it does concern me a little that the joystick might crap out after a few years of use.

It has a fan in it. It's totally silent - I literally can't hear it even if I put my ear right up to it - but sometimes fans get louder over time.

My only other gripe really is an Xbox issue, not an issue with the monitor. When the monitor switches back and forth between regular mode and HDR mode, the screen goes black for a second or two, which is totally normal. Because the Xbox dashboard doesn't use HDR, if you're in a game and you want to browse away from it to check something on the dashboard, you get the black screen as it switches modes, then again when you go back to the game. Hopefully MS can add HDR to the dashboard itself so you can just stay in HDR mode all the time.

Overall though, I am super happy with it! I was concerned with how Windows would look and how well scaling would work, but at 150% scaling, it's perfectly fine. The only issue I had initially was with an old version of Photoshop that I use (CS5 Extended), as that application does not respect the scaling in Windows, so buttons, menu items etc. were fucking TINY, but thankfully, after Windows 10 was released MS updated it with a feature that lets you force applications to adhere to the Windows scaling settings, so once I enabled that for Photoshop, it looks fine. Some text is a little bit too small, but it's still perfectly usable.

[Steve]

On 10/2/2021 at 12:17 AM, Steve said:

It has a fan in it. It's totally silent - I literally can't hear it even if I put my ear right up to it - but sometimes fans get louder over time.

I shouldn't have tempted fate, lol, cos the other night I woke my computer up from sleep, the monitor turned on, and I could hear a ticking noise coming from the fan. It went away after a few minutes, but then twice more in the last week it's happened again, and the last time it happened it was ticking away for almost an hour before the noise stopped. It's not super loud, so if you have music on or whatever, you would never hear it, but if you're sitting in a quiet room just browsing the web or whatever, it's definitely noticeable and kinda annoying.

I'm gonna see how it goes for now, but it looks like I might have to send this in for a repair or replacement, which fucking sucks. At least I kept hold of my previous monitor, so I won't be without a screen if I have to send this one back.