back in january eve said that their upcoming monitor the eve spectrum would
be the world's first 240 hertz
1440p one millisecond ips display with
750 nits of brightness as well as 135
watts of power delivery for your devices all
for a disruptive price and well this is the problem with
kickstarting technology products isn't it because what sound space age today
is commodity tomorrow and here we are
11 months later having reviewed multiple 240 hertz ips monitors including more
than one that's 1440p resolution or higher
so then is their sales pitch still compelling as
we head into 2021 and can eve overcome
their tainted history to make the product a buy rather than a beware we're
going to find out brought to you by ting ting is a customer-focused mobile
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now so far all i've managed to open is the stand but it
looks and feels pretty metal as the kids say and presumably it'll be a part of
whichever monitor you decide to order so there's the spectrum qhd so it's 1440p
that runs at 144 hertz for 440 bucks the
spectrum qhd 240 hertz and the spectrum 4k
144hz that last one is the one we have which is actually kind of unfortunate
because i was a little more interested in the 240hz
qhd model all of them are using lg ips panels and
the qhds seem to use the same panel as the lg 27 gl850 while the 4k model
probably uses the same panel as the lg 27gn 950 that is their only 4k 144 hertz
of course this is all according to what
eve says and eve does not have a
spotless record for delivering exactly what they say when they say they're
going to do it of course that doesn't stop us from being curious about their
progress on the spectrum which is why we've agreed to take a look at what is
an early unit to give us an idea of what the industrial design is going to look
like according to eve this is something that we can count on hopefully what the
performance is going to be like for anyone who either backs or buys this
monitor once it's just normally available
okay documentation time what the devil yeah they emailed saying
this was out of date so here's the real one you've got a 10 gigabit per second
uplink that's the usb type c on the bottom the two type a's are both 10
gigabit per second the one type c on the side
is also 10 gigabit per second and finally the type b
is just a regular upstream five gigabit
per second according to the latest spec sheet ah power bricks in here kind of a cool
idea for the packaging that's neat
pretty beefy but you would expect that from something that has to power not
only itself but i don't know the numbers are all over the place but at least 100
watts of external device apparently HDMI 2.1 is not yet working
in our early unit so that's not something that we're going to try to do
for now apparently it wants a displayport connection so we'll see how
that goes if this doesn't immediately work we're throwing it in the garbage
just kidding displayport's a terrible connector and it could necessitate a reboot
that whole split down the middle thing on 4k monitors used to be a thing back
when they were using two paneled displays and like
displayport multi-stream technology but i thought this is supposed to be using
display stream compression to a single tile
display so i'm a little confused let's just double check and see if we even
have the 4k one yes we do uh
uh james uh did both sides of it look different
when you hooked it up so this is our second unit actually the
first one had a broken joystick so we couldn't navigate the menu properly
which wouldn't have been a huge problem except that the up direction didn't work
on the joystick and it was set to the minimum brightness out of the box so we
couldn't turn the brightness up now this one
you have got to be kidding me only down and right work
i'm just going to reboot what
i think the menu is completely frozen i think we just blue screened the
monitor's on-screen display i mean not blue strictly speaking
whatever you guys know what i'm talking about i don't think i've ever seen this before
we just locked up a monitor firmware uh okay so let's try this again
oh my god okay no that's not what i wanted to do i
don't really know what to say at this point hold on a second
did switching to HDR make the line go
is it there but just less noticeable no i think it's gone fine screw it
let's game in HDR at 4k
144 hertz okay whoa that's weird
do you see that shadow down the middle now now there are a handful of issues that
eve was aware that we would find with this unit like the housing tolerances
are not yet final the firmware is obviously early the USB-C port does not
charge devices correctly yet but what they told us is that in terms of
performance this was supposed to be very
close to what customers will eventually receive at least in terms of color
accuracy they've still got some work to do with apparently the blurbusters folks
which is somewhat promising to me to get their motion blur reduction like
really down pat and they claim these monitors will be calibrated at the
factory for delta ease of less than two in p3 standard and at a d65 white point
uh spoiler alert if this is supposed to be a delta e less than two
we don't seem to be quite there yet HDR performance is apparently something
that they're still tweaking and some good news is that i don't see that dark
stain down the middle of the screen when we're out of the menu
oh you know what it's got full screen dimming on right
now wait what just happened
it's supposed to be off okay now just a sec
it's clearly on right brandon like when i open the menu
the entire screen clearly gets brighter okay so this it's not supposed to have
dimming enabled though see backlight dimming is supposed to be off
so it's just this broken menu
yeah strangely g-sync doesn't show up at all
so it doesn't even allow me to force it one other thing we can test is whether
my laptop will charge right now they say the main problem is
compatibility so some devices should actually work even
on this early unit for charging mine does not
this is the bottom one right
yeah okay well whatever you know what what's the worst that can happen fry my
laptop pc isn't charging use the recommended
charger and cable and make sure it's directly plugged in all right fair enough the correct way to evaluate a
display using the blurbuster's ufo test
is not with your eyes but i've looked at it enough times that it
gives me a rough idea to just look at it and i can tell you guys now that there's
no kind of blur reduction enabled
whatsoever yeah okay okay overdrive off so let's try
and see if that helps at all because i just don't
i don't think any of this is doing anything the plan today was to pull out the high
speed camera and shoot 1000 FPS footage of this so that we could really evaluate
its motion blur performance because that's one of the things that's so great
about the lg monitor that's based on this same panel but this is so far off
that there'd be no point even evaluating it
i mean i don't know but not soon moving on to color then we know that this panel
is capable of excellent performance which means it comes down to calibration
unfortunately compared to the lg gn 950
it's not even close in spite of eve telling
us that this unit was supposed to be pretty representative of the color
accuracy of a finished model now it's better than the one that was locked at
zero brightness but i wouldn't use it for any kind of color accurate work
whereas the lg out of the box was pretty darn close so then
here's our problem going back to the original sales pitch
everything looks great and honestly
there's a lot here that's really promising it's
very compelling value if they actually deliver on all those selling points
but this is the issue with backing tech products on kickstarter
back when they announced this monitor it seemed like unbelievable
and now the timeline has slipped i mean this
project began in earnest in march 2019
to the point where there's competing products that you can
already buy and this is
if this actually ships on their estimated date which is february 2021
i will be floored like
this unit right here there's a manufacturing date on the back december
2020. they just made this and it's it's
just it's not close it's not close at all but with that said
remember how i said you could sort of buy competing products
let's talk about that for high refresh rate ips monitors we've got the acer
predator xg17 that runs at 240 hertz and
the ASUS pg259q which actually runs at a
whopping 360 hertz but those aren't
really quite comparable because they only run at 1080p whereas 1440p which
should theoretically be available at up to 240 hertz with the need spectrum is
much much finer looking now as for 1440p
240hz there is the samsung odyssey g7
but it maxes out at 600 nits peak brightness it sold out basically
everywhere though in theory you could get it for as little as 550
and it's curved which not everyone is into there's the samsung odyssey g9 that
one's also 240hz 1440p but is super wide
also curved and is a thousand dollars
now as for direct competitors for this guy right here 4k 144hz well lg already
has the 27 gn 950 it's 800
has RGB on the back which is cool but it
has no power delivery no HDMI 2.1 so if
you have a gaming pc and a next-gen console say in your dorm room or
something like that because you're a baller student or whatever and you want to hook them both up to the same display
well you'll get the best experience with something that does have HDMI 2.1 and
it's sold out everywhere and is going for anywhere from 1100 to 1400 on ebay
damn new scalpers and finally ASUS has announced an HDMI
2.1 43-inch monitor but they are also
not shipping that yet so time could be more on each side than we originally
thought if they can deliver which is kind of the
biggest elephant in the room because eve's got a bit of a history the ev was
a Windows 10 two in one that compared very favorably to microsoft surface pro
while costing considerably less unfortunately evetech couldn't produce
or fulfill enough orders to meet the demand and many backers receive their
devices months or even years after they placed their orders it just kind of
points to them not necessarily having a perfect track record when it comes to
supply chain management and following through which sort of raises the
question i see a lot of potential here but the concern for me is that they were
so eager to send me something that's not quite ready that it gives me concerns
about the business side of things do they have enough funding to actually do
the production runs or do they need more pre-orders for example and i have no way
of answering that question for you so
if it actually lives up to the specs that
they say it will have looks pretty freaking sick to me
but it remains to be seen if it will just like it remains to be seen how i'm
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if you guys are looking for our kind of current king of gaming monitors right
now maybe check out our video on the lg c10 48 inch okay not a monitor per se
but it's pretty freaking sick