high dynamic range or HDR everyone's telling you you need to get it it's an
amazing thing but what they don't tell you is what kind of hardware do you
actually need to have a good experience so behind me i've got an assortment of
monitors today everything from ASUS pro art pa32ucx
this is a 4 000 HDR monitor intended for content
creators all the way down to this
i'm actually really excited about this one this is the new sync x250 fg0
165 used to be something else they got a sticker on there
HDR so we're going to go all the way from the highest level of vasa
certification display HDR 1000 down to
display HDR 600 down to 400 and down to
something that says HDR on the box but doesn't feature any certification
whatsoever and see if it really does make a difference
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i just really have to know what's under this sticker it's got to be 144. my
original intention was to start with the cheapest monitor and then work my way up
determining if the additional performance was worth the additional
cost but what i realized was that without the context of the god tier
monitor i would actually have to go back and revisit those cheaper ones because i
might not have realized while i was looking at them what i was missing out
on so i'm going to get my desk torn apart here
and get this thing which i'm actually going to be seeing in person for the first time
opened up your wall this one's really heavy this is really exciting this is as far
as i'm aware the first monitor with support for
HDR 10 dolby vision
hlg and then i think there might even be one
other HDR standard that it's compliant with and yes it costs four grand but
there's a lot of tech that goes into making a monitor that delivers a really
great HDR experience so it features over a thousand
zones of local dimming it's got a quantum dot layer to enable
its otherwise you know pedestrian ips panel to achieve better contrast and
better color reproduction and of course it is meticulously
calibrated before it leaves the factory hence the
calibration report
would you look at that the stand doesn't even cost a thousand
dollars courage holy crap
the move to OLED cannot happen soon enough for
professional displays i don't remember
the last time i saw a monitor this
thick that wasn't from like 2002
turning HDR on i'm
not necessarily convinced that that kicked in
got it sorted it didn't look good because the room was under bright studio
lighting so i've dimmed the room a little bit now and this is a spectacular
scene to use as an example of what a good HDR display will do for you we can
see all the dimly lit details exactly as they would look to our eyes inside the
weapon shop here but when we switch back to this shot where we can see people
walking around in the bright sunlight the look of our indoor characters
doesn't change while these guys you can actually make them out shockingly well
on this monitor obviously this isn't a gaming focus
display but in games that support HDR you can see a very similar difference in
the environmental lighting where shadows are dark and gloomy but still detailed
and then bright points like the sun shining through the foliage are kind of
blinding to your eyes as you're slinking about you know looking for a jaguar to
fight or whatever the case may be man this is a pretty game in HDR the
headline difference between HDR 1000 and HDR 600 is obviously
the difference in uh peak brightness it goes from a thousand
nits down to just 600 nits but one slightly less obvious difference
is that on an HDR 600 monitor
the manufacturer is only required to hit
for a sustained period 350 nits compared to 600 in HDR 1000.
wow that's a heavy monitor digging around in the menus as you can
see just like our display HDR 1000 model our 600 model also supports local
dimming when they created the specifications the vase organization
said they didn't think that with modern technology 600 or 1000 levels would be
achievable without local dimming so i guess that uh has stood up pretty well
so far HDR might have turned off when i was
hey no sweetie
all right some honest feedback for the plex team you guys got to fix your your
zoom options here you should never have
black bars on all sides of a video immediately you can tell that the
darkness inside the weapon shop is not
as dark now to some people's eyes this is probably going to look a lot better
but the difference between the darkest
representations of our scene and the brightest ones outside is clearly not as
wide as for whether i would look at this and go yeah i really need to spend
hundreds if not thousands of dollars more on a monitor
probably not at this stage in the game interestingly we see the exact same
behavior at least to my eyes gaming in shadow of the tomb raider so once again
the highlights like the sun reflecting off of this branch here are are bright
enough that it makes sense to me that the detail in
them is kind of clipped but
all of this darkness here in the foliage
it looks less like darkness and it looks more like uh
like a boosted gamma filter over it you know like a black equalizer gaming
feature or something like that with a 1080p
144 hertz ips panel
the vg271 pbmi ipx
great product naming scheme you guys have got over there acer
seems on paper like it ticks a lot of
the most important boxes and at just over 200 on promo at the time of filming
this especially when you consider that it includes
HDR certification it seems like
basically the way to go of course for it to end up with a recommendation it's
going to have to live up to what it says on the outside of the box and i
discovered something fascinating almost right away
no HDR enable button and if we go into
the monitor settings you can see that it's actually the same
situation it's grayed out well as it turns out some of these more budget HDR
displays actually are equipped with displayport 1.2 rather than displayport
1.4 ports that means there's a reason acer included an HDMI
cable in the box in order to run HDR
you're gonna have to hook up to your graphics card over HDMI
it looks awful that's okay because we should be able to enable HDR in the menu
now there we go the good news is these are HDMI 2.0 ports so we get to take
advantage of that smooth 144hz refresh rate the bad news is popping open the
NVIDIA control panel you can see we can't enable
g-sync on this freesync display because we're not hooked up via DisplayPort so
you're going to have to pick one or the other in the scene in the weapon shop
the shaded areas look quite similar to our display HDR 600 monitor but
where we really see the difference and this is interesting is actually in those
characters in the background this is where the lack of full array local
dimming is going to hurt this display so see this instead of
brightness in the hair and off the you know shoulder armor of these vikings
walking around back here we just see clipped white
so you're losing detail in the image there our gaming test shows this really
well again while the shadows don't really look that different to me than
the display HDR 600 monitor so they still got kind of that gray haziness
it's here in the highlights where we run into real problems so instead of seeing
the sun shining through the foliage we've just got a completely clipped zone
where you can't even see the trunk of a tree here like you're losing a lot
of the image because it simply can't represent it coming into this brightly
lit colorful clearing though we see a good example of the game looking better
in HDR even HDR 400 than it would in
standard dynamic range the problem though is that the whole
game doesn't look like this on a display that just can't handle HDR well and if
your low lights are awful then you're not giving your highlights a chance to
shine through and yes
that was a completely intentional double entendre can you just die please whoops
that was a bad shot now for the new sync x250 fg0165
HDR this one is very interesting to me because you
might think gee Linus you're already only spending 200 on a brand name
monitor to get that one from acer
how much lower do you really need to go well this puppy was purchased for just
around 150 bucks it's 50 dollars cheaper
there's already some compromises compared to the acer unit this stand is
about as wimpy of one as i've seen in
the last little bit but it is made of metal to its credit
and the power supply rather than being integrated into the monitor is actually
just a power brick with a super janky
adapter on it two new syncs credit the inclusion of a DisplayPort rather than
an HDMI cable seems to suggest that it's
got a displayport 1.4 connector but we
will find out very shortly if that's the case
look at that it does there's my 165
hertz refresh rate hey it's got a joystick type menu oh it's backwards you
go this way to confirm oh that's curious HDR is clearly enabled but it looks like
absolute bud yup that's working wow even in this
scene though you can really see that clipping in the
ferns here this rock the sun coming over here
oops i didn't actually screw that in i'd say the main issue for me so far though
is actually the green cast oh wow
okay i lied the main issue is the dynamic range
compared to our last one you know with display hdr400 certification rather than
just the ability to accept an HDR signal on
the like processor level is
night and day there's almost nothing left of our
background characters here look at this you can barely see his pecs
okay i've got very low expectations for the rest of this let's move on to gaming
yep it's even worse the clipping extends all the way down to here we're losing
detail not just in like a tree trunk like i bet i can lose that whole tree in
the sun shining behind it that is that is truly remarkable right
there and our shadows barely even look like shadows it just looks like the
whole scene is shot in like a like a camera cinematic mode in fact we could
probably use that camera up there to show what ungraded cinematic footage
looks like versus once you've applied a grade to it
there you go that's definitely worse than just playing the game in sdr on
that subject why don't we just try that look at that
look at that so much better it's still got a green
cast to it still not a great display but this is it
sdr game looks way better so in conclusion then
HDR not a gimmick but if you're looking to
spend more than a couple hundred dollars you're probably going to have to wait a
little bit before you can have the HDR experience that everyone is talking
about and saying is so great with that said if i was looking for an
entry-level HDR display i would definitely go for one with vasa's
display HDR certification versus one that wasn't able to get it because it
actually encompasses far more than just
the darkest darks and brightest brights on the display it also specifies that it
needs to be able to cover a certain color gamut and other important specs
like that so new sync monitor
maybe not a terrible budget gaming display if you need a 165 hertz 1080p
display and you're willing to tweak the color profile a little bit to get rid of
this green cast but for HDR i wouldn't
recommend it not the way that i'd recommend our
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look at some low priced high refresh rate gaming displays
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