This monitor is less than half the area of my current desktop display, and yet by the end of this video
I might be ready to downgrade.
Obviously not everything about the 2725DF from Alienware is a downgrade. Some things are pretty big upgrades starting of course with
the panel. I mean none of this sounds that new or exciting. QD OLED from Samsung display, seen it. QHD
Sounds like 4k for poor people. 360 Hertz? Baby, call me when you got 500.
Except in the real world, that's just not how it works.
Products can be more than the sum of their parts, and this one is a lot more.
And if I hadn't been putting on my best toxic elitist persona before, there were some hints on the packaging.
For example, this 0.03 millisecond response time. Check out this pursuit camera test.
It looks like a still image. This thing offers some of, if not the,
best motion clarity we have ever seen on a display that doesn't use a cathode ray tube.
To be clear, any OLED is going to be fast, much faster than any LCD,
but this takes things to a whole other level. The next big hint is that
99.3% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. That in and of itself doesn't make a monitor good.
You could have a wide gamut display that, whether due to poor factory calibration or just
bad product design philosophy with gross, you know, vivid, best-buy display model syndrome, just isn't accurate.
But this one is, friends, I am talking in SDR, a maximum Delta E out of the box of
0.9, when 2 is considered fine for professional work, and in HDR, some of the best
color accuracy we have ever seen on a display ever.
Remember when gaming monitors had compromises? Yeah, me neither anymore.
A lot of this performance just comes down to Dell's decision to use a third-generation
2024 model QD OLED panel from Samsung. We've got a full video on that over on the LTT channel where you can learn more of the ins and outs of it.
It's sponsored by Samsung Display, but all of the numbers in it were measured by our team
here in our own lab on these Alienware monitors,
which I am very excited to be able to tell you guys about because they were still under embargo when we did that video.
And the thing is, there's more to making a good monitor than just the panel that you integrate.
There's the design and accessory package. This one has integrated cable management, includes DisplayPort, HDMI, DisplayPort to USB-C, and a USB-A to B uplink cable for the integrated hub,
which has, I believe it's three type A ports, one on the bottom, two on the back, and one type C.
It even comes with a little built-in cleaning cloth, which allows us to most easily see the biggest disadvantage of QD OLED.
You see that kind of purple cast on the screen.
Unlike a W OLED, which is LG's competing technology, QD OLED doesn't quite get black black,
especially in a brightly lit environment like the studio we're in right now.
It's not going to affect you in your mom's dimly lit basement or whatever because like other OLED displays, when these pixels are black,
they're off. No light. So in Vesa, True Black, 400 mode or whatever it is, this thing will do 500 nits of brightness.
That next to a little bit of purple, you're not going to see it.
And you're especially not going to see it in the 1000 nit peak brightness mode that it'll do, I believe, up to a 2% window.
But it is something to be aware of because, actually, this is perfect.
I've got my laptop here for comparison. It just isn't quite as black.
There are also some other compromises compared to this monitor's bigger 4K or brother, and that's aside from just the size and resolution.
It doesn't have any G-Sync validation of any sort, just FreeSync Premium Pro, though
I'm not really convinced that matters. We enabled G-Sync with it before and it seemed to work fine, just fine.
The bigger one is that because it doesn't have the same increased pixel density compared to the last one,
you're going to see more of the text fringing that people had talked about, particularly with the previous generation of this panel technology.
It's improved, but not nearly as much as the 4K model.
Of course, I wouldn't be saying that I'm considering upgrading to this one if I thought that any of these were deal breakers.
And compared to the 240 Hz of that bigger display,
Oh, the 360 is just so smooth.
It shouldn't matter that much. But man, guys, shooting that last video, like I was just putting together killstreaks, like I couldn't miss.
And I guess this is my chance to prove it.
Actually, before we play games, I should probably poke around in the settings a little bit.
First up, is it running at 360 Hz? Yes.
It's just crazy seeing that number like that. Also, we can poke around in the menu a little bit.
We're in HDR peak 1000 mode. This is cool.
You've got a little panel health indicator here. They offer a three year no burn-in warranty.
It's kind of neat. Are you kidding me?
Are you f***ing kidding me, Microsoft?
Sign in with a different Microsoft account. What does that mean?
It means a different one. I don't know Pluth's password.
This has been a bug. For at least two years.
Get it together. Go to control panel at the bottom and sign out.
Press F1. What control panel? I have no control panel.
Other ways to sign in? Nope.
Unbelievable. This is the workaround.
To remove these credential manager credentials.
I don't know how to describe this other than unbelievable.
We even got Pluth's password. Want to show them the thing?
Call in. Enter the password. Let's show them the stupid loop.
I hope someone from Microsoft is watching and fixes this immediately.
Here's another. I can't play this game. Sign in is blocked.
I just tried to sign in as my own account. Someone entered the wrong password too many times.
What are you talking about? That's not a thing that happened.
Guarantee you I can sign into that on my laptop right now.
What? Well, when did that happen?
Finally. Confirmed with Pluth. For some reason his locked after one attempt as well.
Something about doing anything with your account on this machine
just immediately locks your Microsoft account
and makes it so you have to reset your password. Genius.
Anyway, we're in. Hack the mainframe.
Not in a gaming mindset anymore. Now I have an excuse for not being good.
I have no sound but hopefully I'm going to be able to make this work.
Do. I don't know what it is.
It's not about hurts. It's about the smoothness and the motion clarity.
It's impossible not to click the guy.
It's crazy guys. I don't think I have to convince anyone that I'm not this good at video games.
It's crazy.
Where'd it come from? I don't know this map.
I also have no sound. I'm using that as a legitimate excuse
when I don't know where my opponent is coming from. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Got him. Come on. Where's my headset?
Seriously though, you guys have seen me play games before.
I am not this good. Oh, I fell. See?
See? Someone who falls off the map should not be getting headshots like that.
If I wasn't seeing this, I wouldn't believe it.
Or rather, if I wasn't living it, I wouldn't believe it.
I have the most kills on the server with no sound.
Got him. Already popped his shields.
Now he's dead.
How dare you. How...
Oh, wow, they're all... See, that's these guys' problem.
They are always playing the objective. Dead.
Uh... Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.
Man, just... I swear, guys, I cannot click heads like that.
And yet, there it is. I don't think I have,
in my memory, encountered a piece of equipment
that has affected my ability to game like this before.
Like, it's just so easy to track things.
It's not going to compensate for not knowing your way around maps and stuff, you know?
But just, it does compensate for...
Just being able to see and track objects on the screen better.
It's crazy. Yeah, we tried.
The big thing I'd be interested to see is if my hit percentage is significantly higher than usual,
but I think that's only during certain game modes.
The truth is, I don't actually play this game that much.
Actually, here, we can see how much I play.
Oh, yeah, there. 91 hours? No, that's not right.
I probably left it running at some point. What I'd be most interested to see is if there's a difference in my hit percentage.
I suspect there is, but I think that's only during deathmatch mode,
so I don't know what to tell you other than to subscribe to ShortCircuit.