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,
or do you want like a 27 inch high refresh rate monitor? It's hard to know what exactly you want
when you haven't tried any of those things, especially when you're looking at stuff
that's 32 by nine and like a thousand R curvature.
That's what you're going to get when you get the new LG GR85 DC.
Comes in a huge box that I honestly might need help with
because we can't tell. Actually, you know, it's not as bad as I thought.
I could have lifted this myself. I need a knife. Honestly, it's pretty good that we've got a standing desk
that's adjustable because this box is huge.
We've got some instructions on the side here. Don't use an electric screwdriver.
Don't do that. What's that called? A drill? Don't screw into the panel.
That's bad. That says you can pivot it. So that's cool.
Don't use two hands from the bottom. All right, I'm just going to, you know, open it.
We got our stand here, pretty typical for LG. It's just going to click, clack into the monitor
and it's got a nice column that we'll screw into from the bottom. What else? We got the rest of the stand.
Yeah. So when you've got a display that's like this wide,
you kind of need a really wide stand for it so that it doesn't get super unwieldy
and it's going to take up a lot of desk space whether you like it or not.
I guess you could use a monitor ARM if you want to,
but like the reality is for something that's 49 inches, it's going to be pretty heavy
and you're going to need a much more robust ARM and it might cost you about a hundred bucks,
but when you're spending this much on a monitor, maybe that's worth it to you.
And this is a cable cover, little clip doodad to help you keep all your cables in place.
And then we got a bunch of cables. We got a USB A to USB B,
DisplayPort, HDMI, some documentation and a standard C13 power cable.
Oh, color temperature, 6,500 Kelvin, okay.
Max Delta E value of less than five, it's a pass.
All right, so it's relatively color accurate, but less than five isn't all that impressive these days.
Most monitors that we're getting that are a premium display
end up being typically around less than two in the report coming from the factory.
And then we measure them and they're usually around that as well. This is another clip.
I actually don't know what this clip is for. I've never seen this one before.
We'll take our styrofoam off. Oh, maybe, as you can see, it's curved.
It's got a thousand dollar curvature. And that's part of why the box is so incredibly deep.
It does suck how much extra like box depth you get. These are a lot harder to pack and store and move.
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.
It's a super chunky housing on this guy,
partly because the power is all installed here instead of in like a little external power brick.
The stand installs same way most of them do.
You just pop it down there, screw it down.
And then we're just gonna go into here, down.
Now it's ready. You can just pull it out. Okay, here we go.
The realsies, oh my God. I don't know what the weight is.
Can you check what the weight says for specs? Cause this thing is heavy, man.
32 and a half. Wow, I thought it was heavier. I'm just a weakling now.
These are some of the hardest peels I've ever had to take off.
They're really on here. There we go. Oh, but now that it's going, it's going.
Something that is actually really common on a lot of LG monitors is they have their IO
just coming straight out the back like this. And while it might make for a slightly uglier presentation
when you're looking at the back of the monitor, I gotta say from a utilitarian point, it's just so easy.
You come around back and you just plug it in. They're right there.
We've got HDMI, DisplayPort or USBB port
and then two USBAs along with our big C13 power.
And then down here, we've got our headphone jack for anyone who just wants to plug straight into their monitor.
Another thing that I like about a lot of LG displays is they've got this really cool premium texture feel
on the back here. It's just this kind of pattern texture that runs along the whole back of the monitor.
You should be able to see it. It both looks cool and feels pretty good.
And so I'm a big fan of that. It looks like we've also got RGB along the sides here.
I really wish that instead of vents or even alongside the vents, just add more RGB.
I want a full ring going all the way around but maybe that's too much to ask.
I don't know. As for the stand itself, it's pretty beefy.
Feels like aluminum. And yeah, it's not going anywhere.
That's for sure. Actually for table wobble for a monitor this size,
that's like pretty good. I've seen them like really, really get shaky
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.
Actually it said it could pivot a little bit in the book but I don't think it can.
Pretty sure I'm just breaking it. But it can tilt a little bit, not a ton.
And then is height adjustable? Yep, it is.
So you got a height adjustment for you, which is actually pretty great.
Boom, look at this. Yeah, look at all this swivel. It's actually pretty good. I will say LG makes a good stand.
I've never had any issues with their stands. They just kind of work and they look nice.
5120 by 1440.
You basically just have two 1440P panels right here.
It's a VA panel and the viewing angles aren't going to be perfect.
So for some of this, while David's shooting me from this angle, it's not going to look great
and that's not necessarily because the monitor is bad.
However, I would like to point out that even straight on, there is a lot of really weird banding going on.
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
or a paint or a full black paint. It's still not perfect, but it is a little better.
So I'm going to blame that slightly on Windows at least, but yeah, there's still some banding going on.
But yeah, I would just like to make that very clear. It's VA, so him shooting like this
isn't going to be totally representative of exactly how good or bad it looks.
Am I crazy? Is there a bunch of noise? I can't tell if it's glare or not.
No, it's like move, like all along the- Oh, yeah.
Yeah, once you see it. On the left, right? Well, it's a little cross,
but it's like yeah, depending on your viewing angle. Yeah, that's wild.
I wonder if it's because of the screen door effect on this light and on the lower resolution
because let's do a quick little calculator here.
While it's 1440p, it's 1440p across a really big display.
You know, that's actually surprisingly better than I expected it to be.
108 PPI, almost 109 is, it's okay.
It's totally acceptable. You're really not gonna start getting
a ton of screen door effect until you're at a much lower PPI like 80 or even 90.
That being said, you know, 160, 150, anywhere higher is just always better.
But yeah, we're sometimes seeing this weird noise and I can't tell what's going on.
It's a little weird. Now, that being said, this is a gaming monitor.
It does 240 Hertz. It does have HDR.
However, I've been told that it's not good HDR.
Now, it's doing HDR without any sort
of full array local dimming. It's Vesa rated at HDR 1000, which just means
that it gets over 1000 nits peak brightness, which is cool, but it doesn't matter
if your HDR experience is not good.
Honestly, right now, just staring at it from the right angle, it looks pretty good.
It's not perfect. However, HDR on YouTube is not the same
when you're playing games in HDR. So we're gonna fire up a game.
We don't have any full array. We just have columns.
We have about six or eight columns of brightness
that just edge light the screen.
And when you're playing games, it looks bad.
When you press the button, you get input game mode power off settings.
They're just gonna hit settings. I actually really like how the UG for Ultra Gear
kind of like flashes every now and then. That looks pretty cool. I think it can change whatever your different game modes are.
The gamer one definitely looks the best to me. These are all way too dark.
I don't know what they're doing. So for adaptive sync, we've got FreeSync Premium Pro,
which is pretty great. It's not G-Sync, but whatever. FreeSync is pretty decent overall.
Extended, basic off, use whatever you want. Response time, faster, fast, normal.
I'm gonna put it down to fast because a lot of times on screens like this,
when you go with faster, it can introduce a little bit inverse ghosting because it's trying to fix it too much.
Picture adjust, you know, we've got just brightness, sharpness.
In different modes, other than game mode, like especially if we put it to, say, vivid,
or if we just turned game mode itself off, we could probably change more of these settings.
Yeah, you can see that changing down to this one actually illuminated sharpness.
So let's just go back to gamer one, which is the only one that's certified, actually, interesting.
And then for input, oh, we've got PBP and PIP with a bunch of different options.
This is actually really great. I like how clear they've made all of your selections here.
And one of the best things about PBP or PIP,
I don't need it in the majority of monitors, but when something's like 32 by nine,
especially if you have consoles or another computer,
like a laptop maybe, it's really handy to actually be able to be like,
no, this half of the screen is like my PS5, and I'm just gonna game here,
and then this is my computer, and this is like Reddit or Discord
or whatever you wanna keep up there. Super handy feature, and it's actually why I was super mad when the ARC came out
because it didn't do PBP or PIP. For giant screen, I was furious.
As for smoothness, it definitely feels like 240 Hertz,
and it looks pretty good. It doesn't get too smeary or gross
when I do a quick pan here. And in terms of contrast, it's okay.
It's definitely closer to 2000 to one rather than it is anything higher than that.
But yeah, when you move around, it has trouble. Oh, there we go.
Now we can see it. Okay, okay, here's what I'm talking about for bad HDR.
And I know that it looked good in game here, but I wanna be very clear.
Some games don't handle this stuff well. When I was playing Elden Ring,
it was on my old MSI Creator panel, and it had the same like six or eight columns of edge lighting.
And for that, you'd have like a single torch on screen, and you'd have a column of brightness on your screen.
It just looks awful. You can just see as I pan the mouse across.
You see all this bloom? Even just this guy, this UI element,
look at how much they're brightening around that section.
So as I pass my mouse around, it's saying, hey, there's a bright spot there.
We wanna illuminate that bright spot and crank the brightness for HDR.
But what it's doing is it's like, okay, pump the light in from here and here.
And it just, it doesn't do it very well. It doesn't illuminate that pinpoint of brightness
that you get from a true HDR experience with OLED is a perfect example,
or even mini LED as long as they have like 500, a thousand plus zones,
they might have blooming and haloing in mini LED, but you know, it's not a full column of bloom.
It's like, oh, your cursor is a little bright around the edges. Another thing to notice,
look how slowly it fades from bright to black.
Look how long that takes. Now, as for testing, it's not too bad.
I mean, the display boasts a 95% coverage of DCI-P3
and it says about 2,500 to one contrast ratio,
but we did measure more like 2,800 to one, which is okay.
And it does that 95%. We measured 95% in DCI-P3
and we got about 100% in SRGB. So it's got a pretty decent color gamut.
As for accuracy, it's, you know, a little bit of a different story.
Our report says Delta E of no less than five
in all colors, which isn't quite correct. We did get the average of 3.6.
However, we got a high end of 8.6
and I think a yellow particularly hits over five. It's closer to six on that too.
So it's not perfect for color work. You can calibrate it to get a better image,
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,
but they are going to be more color accurate,
at least if they specify that they are. Delta E of two or less is very common these days.
So that's kind of what your target should be. As for brightness, we got about 450 nits in SDR,
which isn't crazy bright considering the HDR 1000
Vesa rating. However, HDR, we measured 1,235 nits,
which is really bright, but you saw how we're getting that brightness.
It's this weird column edge lighting that just doesn't look good in a lot of scenarios.
You might not notice it in all of your games, and you might not even notice it until you pause the game
and start moving around on a black screen. But when you do, it really takes you out.
As for latency, it's pretty fast at 2.4 milliseconds at 240 Hertz, but that's largely due
to the 240 Hertz refresh rate. I like the monitor, but how much does it cost?
Well, it's $1,300, which it's a lot of money.
And I think I know why it's cause it's like, they're trying to do too many things at once
and throw a big sticker price on it. I think that at this size and at this price,
you can find something that's either maybe a little smaller, but significantly nicer,
or it's all the same here, but a much nicer panel for maybe a couple hundred dollars more.
I don't think I can recommend the LG 49 GR 85 DC.
Wow, what a mouthful. It's just not really the monitor for me.
I think at this price point, you're better off getting a smaller screen with better display tech,
or if you really need something this big, get a TV instead, get a C2
when it's on sale, get a C1 on sale, 48 inch. It's great, great TV.
This is ShortCircuit, and if you want to check out a monitor with good local dimming,
check out the Sony Inzone M9. It's got a hundred zones, well, 96, but who's counting?