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So you want to buy an Ultra Gear, but you don't know what to get. Do you need like a giant 49 inch screen like this guy,

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or do you want like a 27 inch high refresh rate monitor? It's hard to know what exactly you want

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when you haven't tried any of those things, especially when you're looking at stuff

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that's 32 by nine and like a thousand R curvature.

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That's what you're going to get when you get the new LG GR85 DC.

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Comes in a huge box that I honestly might need help with

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because we can't tell. Actually, you know, it's not as bad as I thought.

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I could have lifted this myself. I need a knife. Honestly, it's pretty good that we've got a standing desk

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that's adjustable because this box is huge.

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We've got some instructions on the side here. Don't use an electric screwdriver.

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Don't do that. What's that called? A drill? Don't screw into the panel.

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That's bad. That says you can pivot it. So that's cool.

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Don't use two hands from the bottom. All right, I'm just going to, you know, open it.

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We got our stand here, pretty typical for LG. It's just going to click, clack into the monitor

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and it's got a nice column that we'll screw into from the bottom. What else? We got the rest of the stand.

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Yeah. So when you've got a display that's like this wide,

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you kind of need a really wide stand for it so that it doesn't get super unwieldy

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and it's going to take up a lot of desk space whether you like it or not.

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I guess you could use a monitor ARM if you want to,

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but like the reality is for something that's 49 inches, it's going to be pretty heavy

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and you're going to need a much more robust ARM and it might cost you about a hundred bucks,

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but when you're spending this much on a monitor, maybe that's worth it to you.

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And this is a cable cover, little clip doodad to help you keep all your cables in place.

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And then we got a bunch of cables. We got a USB A to USB B,

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DisplayPort, HDMI, some documentation and a standard C13 power cable.

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Oh, color temperature, 6,500 Kelvin, okay.

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Max Delta E value of less than five, it's a pass.

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All right, so it's relatively color accurate, but less than five isn't all that impressive these days.

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Most monitors that we're getting that are a premium display

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end up being typically around less than two in the report coming from the factory.

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And then we measure them and they're usually around that as well. This is another clip.

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I actually don't know what this clip is for. I've never seen this one before.

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We'll take our styrofoam off. Oh, maybe, as you can see, it's curved.

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It's got a thousand dollar curvature. And that's part of why the box is so incredibly deep.

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It does suck how much extra like box depth you get. These are a lot harder to pack and store and move.

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And I'm always like a little bit afraid of taking them out of the box. So, okay, here's the rest of our display.

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It's a super chunky housing on this guy,

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partly because the power is all installed here instead of in like a little external power brick.

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The stand installs same way most of them do.

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You just pop it down there, screw it down.

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And then we're just gonna go into here, down.

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Now it's ready. You can just pull it out. Okay, here we go.

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The realsies, oh my God. I don't know what the weight is.

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Can you check what the weight says for specs? Cause this thing is heavy, man.

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32 and a half. Wow, I thought it was heavier. I'm just a weakling now.

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These are some of the hardest peels I've ever had to take off.

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They're really on here. There we go. Oh, but now that it's going, it's going.

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Something that is actually really common on a lot of LG monitors is they have their IO

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just coming straight out the back like this. And while it might make for a slightly uglier presentation

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when you're looking at the back of the monitor, I gotta say from a utilitarian point, it's just so easy.

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You come around back and you just plug it in. They're right there.

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We've got HDMI, DisplayPort or USBB port

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and then two USBAs along with our big C13 power.

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And then down here, we've got our headphone jack for anyone who just wants to plug straight into their monitor.

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Another thing that I like about a lot of LG displays is they've got this really cool premium texture feel

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on the back here. It's just this kind of pattern texture that runs along the whole back of the monitor.

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You should be able to see it. It both looks cool and feels pretty good.

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And so I'm a big fan of that. It looks like we've also got RGB along the sides here.

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I really wish that instead of vents or even alongside the vents, just add more RGB.

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I want a full ring going all the way around but maybe that's too much to ask.

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I don't know. As for the stand itself, it's pretty beefy.

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Feels like aluminum. And yeah, it's not going anywhere.

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That's for sure. Actually for table wobble for a monitor this size,

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that's like pretty good. I've seen them like really, really get shaky

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when you just start adding a bit of shake and this is not too bad. It can't do a whole lot in terms of like pivot or tilt.

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Actually it said it could pivot a little bit in the book but I don't think it can.

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Pretty sure I'm just breaking it. But it can tilt a little bit, not a ton.

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And then is height adjustable? Yep, it is.

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So you got a height adjustment for you, which is actually pretty great.

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Boom, look at this. Yeah, look at all this swivel. It's actually pretty good. I will say LG makes a good stand.

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I've never had any issues with their stands. They just kind of work and they look nice.

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5120 by 1440.

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You basically just have two 1440P panels right here.

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It's a VA panel and the viewing angles aren't going to be perfect.

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So for some of this, while David's shooting me from this angle, it's not going to look great

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and that's not necessarily because the monitor is bad.

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However, I would like to point out that even straight on, there is a lot of really weird banding going on.

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I don't know if this is just Windows trying to do stuff. So I'm going to bring up like a full white website

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or a paint or a full black paint. It's still not perfect, but it is a little better.

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So I'm going to blame that slightly on Windows at least, but yeah, there's still some banding going on.

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But yeah, I would just like to make that very clear. It's VA, so him shooting like this

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isn't going to be totally representative of exactly how good or bad it looks.

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Am I crazy? Is there a bunch of noise? I can't tell if it's glare or not.

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No, it's like move, like all along the- Oh, yeah.

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Yeah, once you see it. On the left, right? Well, it's a little cross,

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but it's like yeah, depending on your viewing angle. Yeah, that's wild.

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I wonder if it's because of the screen door effect on this light and on the lower resolution

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because let's do a quick little calculator here.

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While it's 1440p, it's 1440p across a really big display.

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You know, that's actually surprisingly better than I expected it to be.

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108 PPI, almost 109 is, it's okay.

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It's totally acceptable. You're really not gonna start getting

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a ton of screen door effect until you're at a much lower PPI like 80 or even 90.

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That being said, you know, 160, 150, anywhere higher is just always better.

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But yeah, we're sometimes seeing this weird noise and I can't tell what's going on.

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It's a little weird. Now, that being said, this is a gaming monitor.

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It does 240 Hertz. It does have HDR.

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However, I've been told that it's not good HDR.

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Now, it's doing HDR without any sort

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of full array local dimming. It's Vesa rated at HDR 1000, which just means

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that it gets over 1000 nits peak brightness, which is cool, but it doesn't matter

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if your HDR experience is not good.

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Honestly, right now, just staring at it from the right angle, it looks pretty good.

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It's not perfect. However, HDR on YouTube is not the same

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when you're playing games in HDR. So we're gonna fire up a game.

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We don't have any full array. We just have columns.

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We have about six or eight columns of brightness

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that just edge light the screen.

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And when you're playing games, it looks bad.

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When you press the button, you get input game mode power off settings.

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They're just gonna hit settings. I actually really like how the UG for Ultra Gear

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kind of like flashes every now and then. That looks pretty cool. I think it can change whatever your different game modes are.

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The gamer one definitely looks the best to me. These are all way too dark.

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I don't know what they're doing. So for adaptive sync, we've got FreeSync Premium Pro,

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which is pretty great. It's not G-Sync, but whatever. FreeSync is pretty decent overall.

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Extended, basic off, use whatever you want. Response time, faster, fast, normal.

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I'm gonna put it down to fast because a lot of times on screens like this,

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when you go with faster, it can introduce a little bit inverse ghosting because it's trying to fix it too much.

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Picture adjust, you know, we've got just brightness, sharpness.

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In different modes, other than game mode, like especially if we put it to, say, vivid,

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or if we just turned game mode itself off, we could probably change more of these settings.

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Yeah, you can see that changing down to this one actually illuminated sharpness.

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So let's just go back to gamer one, which is the only one that's certified, actually, interesting.

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And then for input, oh, we've got PBP and PIP with a bunch of different options.

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This is actually really great. I like how clear they've made all of your selections here.

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And one of the best things about PBP or PIP,

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I don't need it in the majority of monitors, but when something's like 32 by nine,

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especially if you have consoles or another computer,

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like a laptop maybe, it's really handy to actually be able to be like,

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no, this half of the screen is like my PS5, and I'm just gonna game here,

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and then this is my computer, and this is like Reddit or Discord

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or whatever you wanna keep up there. Super handy feature, and it's actually why I was super mad when the ARC came out

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because it didn't do PBP or PIP. For giant screen, I was furious.

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As for smoothness, it definitely feels like 240 Hertz,

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and it looks pretty good. It doesn't get too smeary or gross

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when I do a quick pan here. And in terms of contrast, it's okay.

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It's definitely closer to 2000 to one rather than it is anything higher than that.

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But yeah, when you move around, it has trouble. Oh, there we go.

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Now we can see it. Okay, okay, here's what I'm talking about for bad HDR.

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And I know that it looked good in game here, but I wanna be very clear.

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Some games don't handle this stuff well. When I was playing Elden Ring,

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it was on my old MSI Creator panel, and it had the same like six or eight columns of edge lighting.

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And for that, you'd have like a single torch on screen, and you'd have a column of brightness on your screen.

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It just looks awful. You can just see as I pan the mouse across.

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You see all this bloom? Even just this guy, this UI element,

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look at how much they're brightening around that section.

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So as I pass my mouse around, it's saying, hey, there's a bright spot there.

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We wanna illuminate that bright spot and crank the brightness for HDR.

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But what it's doing is it's like, okay, pump the light in from here and here.

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And it just, it doesn't do it very well. It doesn't illuminate that pinpoint of brightness

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that you get from a true HDR experience with OLED is a perfect example,

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or even mini LED as long as they have like 500, a thousand plus zones,

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they might have blooming and haloing in mini LED, but you know, it's not a full column of bloom.

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It's like, oh, your cursor is a little bright around the edges. Another thing to notice,

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look how slowly it fades from bright to black.

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Look how long that takes. Now, as for testing, it's not too bad.

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I mean, the display boasts a 95% coverage of DCI-P3

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and it says about 2,500 to one contrast ratio,

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but we did measure more like 2,800 to one, which is okay.

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And it does that 95%. We measured 95% in DCI-P3

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and we got about 100% in SRGB. So it's got a pretty decent color gamut.

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As for accuracy, it's, you know, a little bit of a different story.

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Our report says Delta E of no less than five

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in all colors, which isn't quite correct. We did get the average of 3.6.

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However, we got a high end of 8.6

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and I think a yellow particularly hits over five. It's closer to six on that too.

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So it's not perfect for color work. You can calibrate it to get a better image,

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but I don't know. The problem is a lot of other displays, they might not be as big and as curved as this guy,

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but they are going to be more color accurate,

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at least if they specify that they are. Delta E of two or less is very common these days.

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So that's kind of what your target should be. As for brightness, we got about 450 nits in SDR,

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which isn't crazy bright considering the HDR 1000

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Vesa rating. However, HDR, we measured 1,235 nits,

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which is really bright, but you saw how we're getting that brightness.

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It's this weird column edge lighting that just doesn't look good in a lot of scenarios.

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You might not notice it in all of your games, and you might not even notice it until you pause the game

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and start moving around on a black screen. But when you do, it really takes you out.

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As for latency, it's pretty fast at 2.4 milliseconds at 240 Hertz, but that's largely due

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to the 240 Hertz refresh rate. I like the monitor, but how much does it cost?

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Well, it's $1,300, which it's a lot of money.

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And I think I know why it's cause it's like, they're trying to do too many things at once

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and throw a big sticker price on it. I think that at this size and at this price,

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you can find something that's either maybe a little smaller, but significantly nicer,

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or it's all the same here, but a much nicer panel for maybe a couple hundred dollars more.

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I don't think I can recommend the LG 49 GR 85 DC.

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Wow, what a mouthful. It's just not really the monitor for me.

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I think at this price point, you're better off getting a smaller screen with better display tech,

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or if you really need something this big, get a TV instead, get a C2

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when it's on sale, get a C1 on sale, 48 inch. It's great, great TV.

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This is ShortCircuit, and if you want to check out a monitor with good local dimming,

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check out the Sony Inzone M9. It's got a hundred zones, well, 96, but who's counting?