OLED gaming monitors are becoming more and more
affordable. So, I figured why not unbox the Acer Predator X27U X1. It's one of,
if not the most affordable Cutie OLED gaming monitors on the market. Now, that
comes with a few caveats. There are cheaper models out there, but they're all on sale. Whereas this, it's at the
top already. It's only coming down from where it is at the juicy juicy price of
$5.99. That's right. You heard it here
first. Well, probably not. You probably saw something online, but it's a 1440p
240 Hz QD OLED monitor. And right now,
it's upside down. So, let me flip it over. It's going to be fine. No, no, no.
What? It's good. As for what comes in the box, we've got our C5 power cable.
And this guy just slides right into our handy dandy power brick together at
last. Uh, and then we've got an HDMI cable, probably 2.1. Yeah, it says 8K 60
on it. And then we've also got a DisplayPort cable. Press down, then pull. Hey,
I've never seen instructions on how to actually uh take a DP cable out of a
monitor, but that's what you do. You press down on the tab and then you pull it out. That's nifty. I've never seen
that once in my life. Let's take a look at the stand. We've got the classic like
V legs. Um I'm definitely becoming a
bigger fan of just the solid square stand. I liked these at first because it
meant that like up here is all empty, but I don't know, it just doesn't make
sense. you end up with legs in the way and it's kind of annoying, but it's not
too bad. They got like a big double column uh design here, so it's going to
be nice and sturdy. You just pop that in and screw it down. Would you say you
have a vendetta against V's? I
wouldn't. Don't do it like I did. There's instructions on the box. I
highly recommend you just follow those instructions for like how to open it.
Ooh. Actually, this is a really good opportunity to show you the IO before I
put the stand on. Being the bargain bin of monitors. Not to say that's a bad
thing, but you just there's a lot of frills that you don't get when you're
saving money on your display. For example, we have zero USB ports. So, if
you wanted to hook up anything else to this, that's just not happening. It's
literally just a display. And we've got
power, two HDMI ports, DisplayPort, and
audio. But if a lot of you don't care about those extra features, like extra
USB ports or a more robust audio connection on your monitor, you can save
some money. I've got to say, I really do
like how thin these panels are. But it's
really funny how, you know, you say, "Oh, it's so thin." And then you get this big control box. And then one thing
I don't often see on gaming monitors is
a little headphone holder. And it just flips up like that. Look, it's even got a little headphone symbol for you in
case you were, you know, a little confused. One other kind of oddity is
this guy. It looks like it's for cable management. I'm not 100% sure, but I
don't know what else it would be used for because I am kind of noticing that I
don't think there's a pass through anywhere for your cable. So, you're
going to have to just go out and then kind of wrap around and then go through.
Take that as you will. I don't think it's the end of the world. Um, and
realistically, you can just put this thing on a monitor arm anyway. As for the stand itself, it's admittedly not
the sturdiest one I've ever used. It is like a little wobbly and it feels
slightly flimsy just at the very base. However, what do we have in terms of
Okay. And then can we tilt? We can. Can
it pivot? No, it can just do that like very minor pivot. And then let's check
height adjustment. Wow, it's a monitor stand.
But before I plug it in and try it, one thing I've got to complain about
is Acer's naming schemes for their
monitors, because you may have noticed that there are several Predator X27US,
and they're all quite different. Um, for example, there's an 899 model that is
like 4K 240 Hz OLED, and it's you don't
know which one is which. This one has the designation uh all the way over here
on the version number. So, it's an X27U,
but then it's an X1 BM I I PHX, which is
probably the longest monitor name I've ever seen in my entire life. Guys, don't
name them all Predator X27U and then change it by like this is the X1 or this
is what just change the names. I don't know. It's a really minor thing, but
it's going to confuse people. Someone's going to go to the store and they're going to buy the wrong thing. Oh, and
that's not to mention that X27U is just kind of their yearly uh product roll
out. So, like there's old X27U. Do you know what they are? I don't. And you've
got to check the stupid version number. Just put it on the box, but not in a
sticker. Just like X27U X1. You have space. This could be There's plenty of
room here. Even if this monitor is affordable and like a decent value, I
don't like that. Okay, now that that rant's over, I can't wait to tell you guys about gaming on this monitor and
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now. Okay, let's uh check out the OSD. We've got brightness set to 100. Input
is HDMI 2. Uh mode user. And then we've
also got a bunch of picture options as
per usual. HDR. Let's go set to off. No, no, no. HDR 1000 Max. Uh what else do we
have? Color color modes. Oh, color spaces. There's a lot of modes. That's
actually nice how you can change between like simp. That's not super common. We
don't usually see a monitor offering you this many color modes. Um especially on
something like SMTC and Ibu. Uh Rec 709,
HDR, sRGB, those are pretty typical. DCI as well. Um but yeah, that's kind of
nice. Uh of course, we're in HDR mode, so like gamma and color temp and all
that is kind of just grayed out. We can't change anything. Um we're also
currently set to 60 Hz, which I'll fix that in a moment. Uh but one thing
that's really cool that I'm always a fan of is we have speakers. So, I'm going to
turn them I'll go to 80. That's a pretty reasonable speaker
volume. We haven't heard the bass or anything yet, but like just the
ambiance, these are not
bad. Okay, essentially zero bass, but I
don't know if you were expecting that, and you probably shouldn't uh cuz it's
just a computer monitor speaker, but those were fine. Like I could game on
those speakers totally okay. And then hey, you want headphones, you plug them
into the line out on the back and then you're good to go. And of course, Windows looks bad, but that's just
Windows. I promise you when we look at some HDR content, this is definitely not
the most color accurate display we have ever tested. Not even close. However, I
would just like to take a moment to tell you that the level of color accuracy we
are reaching today is so good that this
thing being bad, it's still leagues
ahead of any monitor or TV you've probably looked at as long as it's more
than a year or two old. So, even though the numbers I'm going to tell you in a
bit aren't crazy impressive, they're
still like fine. They're totally as long as you're not like a display nerd or
some colorist, they're fine. And the thing is this still looks really good.
Like that green is probably off and that
red is probably too red. It's it's kind of like you've got vivid mode on, but
it's not even that bad. Like this is still really solid. Like unless I was
testing color swatches, I would personally look at this monitor and be
like, "Yeah, that looks pretty good." It might be a little oversaturated or the
brightness might not be perfect in the right spots with the PQ EOTF curve and
everything, but um this like this is
going to kick the crap out of basically any other non OLED or QD OLED monitor
you've looked at ever, unless you've looked at some very expensive mastering
monitors. Like I've seen this hotel in person and it looks probably like that.
Like I I don't I don't have it right in front of me, but yeah, that blue
probably looks pretty close, if not close enough. You know, while display
nerds and colorists are going to chase that perfect number for a long time,
gaming monitors look so good. Now, as for text, yeah, there's going to be a
bit of fringing. Uh, and it could look slightly better because you're only
getting about 110 ppi, but you're still
getting like 110 ppi. So, I think for the vast majority of you, this is going
to be totally fine. This is crazy. This is making me want to upgrade my monitor.
I've never I have not felt like I needed to. But it's also like it's not even
like you said, it's not even like a really good QD OLED. It's just a cutie
OLED. I know. And it's only like 600 B. Like there are other monitors that will
go on sale that'll be cheaper than this, but like if you can get this one on
sale, think about that. Think about that. But
yeah, the reality is gaming monitors have just come so far in the past couple
of years and prices have dropped. Like a monitor like this a couple years ago,
well more like 3 or 4 years ago now I guess would have been like a couple grand or something. Like it's wild how
inexpensive they are these days. Um we're running at 240 Hz. We are 60 FPS
on our camera and I've got to say it feels great. We did measure latency and
I think uh the lab measured um like4
milliseconds of uh additional display latency which is pretty good. There is
one kind of minor weird problem. We did also do latency testing at uh 120 Hz for
all of you console gamers out here. Um and it does have more significantly
more, but it's still only I think a couple of milliseconds of latency over
theoretical perfect. And when theoretical perfect is like 4
milliseconds, it's it's hardly noticeable. Like I can't notice 2
milliseconds. Can you? I don't think so. I will say my only complaint so far is
it does seem a tad overly bright or uh
washed out. And I think that just has to do with our EOTF tracking. But man, it's
still just really good. Overall, it's pretty solid. Like, it's definitely not
the best monitor I've ever used, but it's also fairly inexpensive. I do have
one final complaint, and it has to do
with the SDR color accuracy. uh they
claim that it's going to be under delta E2000 of two average and we tested
slightly over that. And then in the out of the box mode, we tested closer to
like a five average, which is not incredible. If you've been watching the
channel for a while, uh you know that typically any of these new OLED or QD
OLED monitors are going to be in the 1 to2 delta E2000 range, and they're going
to get a lot better values at the delta E ITP measurements than average of 20.
This is usually these days more like 5 to 10 is very good, but it's like it's
$5.99 and if you buy it used or on sale, it's going to be even cheaper than that.
I just don't know how else uh to explain that. Wait, as much as I might like the
price on this Acer Predator monitor, LG has just announced their new tandem OLED
stuff is finally coming to consumer monitors and it's only going to be $500.
Allegedly, that's coming out in just a few months. So, if you thought this
price was attractive, just wait. There's always better stuff on the
horizon. Gaming monitors these days. And
I know that 600 bucks is still a lot of money for a lot of people. And what I'm
trying to say is that if you're stretching your budget a little bit, it
might be worth it to stretch from 500 to 600 to get this guy, whereas you might
not be able to afford to stretch from 500 to 7 or 800 to get one of the nicer
cutie OLED models. And I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. I
think that this is a perfectly chromulent monitor that any gamer should
be very happy to have. Thanks for watching ShortCircuit. This is the Acer
Predator X27UX1. It's a good monitor for the
price. And if you want to check out any other videos, uh I recently unboxed the
AW 3425DW, which is the successor to my
AW3423DW, which was the first QD OLED monitor that we tried on either LT or
SC. The monitor.