if you were shopping for a new monitor a few years ago the general rule was that
gamers would buy tn panels for their higher refresh rates and fast pixel
response times while creative types would get ips type panels for their
accurate colors and wide viewing angles fast forward to today and ips refresh
rates have climbed from 75 to 110 and
even 144 hertz and now
lg is claiming to have also closed the
pixel response time gap with the 27 gl850 a 1440p
144hz ips monitor with an advertised one
millisecond pixel response time by developing a panel with a new
high-speed liquid crystal layer that promises tn levels of speed if they
pulled that off it's an industry first and it's a huge deal but is it marvelous
or is it marketing
the main effect of pixel response time is the motion blur or the trail behind
moving objects and in order to show you guys exactly what the motion blur is
like on this monitor we turned to blurbuster's excellent guide on how to
build your own inexpensive pursuit camera the idea is to put a camera on a
slider and then try to move it at exactly the same speed as the objects on
screen that way you can capture only the aspects of motion blur that are caused
by the display and not those that are caused by the image persistence of the
human eye sliding the camera at the right speed takes a few tries but they
built in this easy way to tell if you did it right if these lines slant
backwards you were too slow forwards means you were too fast and if they
align vertically then you deserve a high 10.
so here's our results
and admittedly the image is still not
crystal clear but maybe we just need some context for this let's compare with
a couple of other monitors then starting with another ultra gear 120hz gaming
monitor from lg that's advertised as having a more typical ips response time
of 5 milliseconds so
there's no real difference in the amount of detail that we can see in our ufo but
where there is a difference is in the amount of ghosting visible on the
trailing edge of the ship as the pixels struggle to switch colors quickly enough
now we also compared the 27 gl850 to a one millisecond tn panel the ASUS pg258q
and again we get a similar level of detail between the two
but interestingly the ASUS has a different visual artifact on the
trailing edge called corona or inverse
ghosting this particular artifact is the result of pixel overdrive a technique
that uses higher voltages to make the pixels switch colors faster now the goal
of overdrive is to reduce ghosting but it often comes with a side effect called
overshoot where the pixel briefly switches beyond the target color and
then has to come back causing this bright inverse ghosting in the 27 gl850
settings which you navigate with the nipple joystick still my favorite for
on-screen displays you can actually adjust how aggressive the pixel
overdrive is the results we've shown you so far were from tests that used the
fast setting when we crank it up to faster we get coronas again just like
the tn and these look really bad in game
like i would never ever put this monitor or for that matter pretty much any
monitor on fastest because it makes it look way
worse with no real benefit that i can see the good news is that to me the next
setting down feels fantastic already like it's really snappy with barely any
overshoot artifacts but that made me wonder why would lg include this faster
setting at all surely they must know as well as i do that it just looks bad well
here's one theory back when this monitor was announced at e3 2019 the community
was already wondering whether lg's one
millisecond claim was something that the display could achieve reliably or
something it could only do under special circumstances and with overdrive
absolutely cranked so we think that this option is only here so that they could
put one millisecond on the box even if
no one ourselves or lg would actually recommend using that setting but that's
not to say that i don't love this monitor i think it's a great monitor and
not even just because of the response times which do play really clean it also
has a 144hz native refresh rate very decent color accuracy out of the box
thanks to lg's use of nanoceltec which you can learn more about in this video
and it's got variable refresh rate in the form of adaptive sync now some of
you might remember that this monitor was advertised as having g-sync hardware in
it when it was first announced but as you can plainly see the g suffix has
since been dropped from the product name now the monitor still does have a g-sync
sticker on it because it received the g-sync compatible label from NVIDIA so
you'll have variable refresh rate regardless of which graphics team you
play for but you'll miss out on some of the extras that would have come with a
g-sync hardware module and full certification like an unlimited variable
refresh window and 165 hertz overclocking which i guess brings us
perfectly then to the 27 gl850s downsides the first is the lack of HDR
now technically speaking this monitor does
support HDR in that it can accept an hdr10 input source and you can flip HDR
on in Windows however the peak brightness is just 350 nits so it
doesn't even qualify for vasa's lowly display HDR 400 certification similarly
it doesn't have any local dimming to deepen the dark parts of the scene now
honestly speaking i'm not that bothered because HDR on pc still
has some software issues and even premium full array local dimming HDR
monitors like the one i have at home can still suffer from halos and poor viewing
angles due to the chunky dimming zones moving to the outside the i o is also
just okay one displayport 1.4 two HDMI
2.0 ports and a small hub with two usb 3s and a spot for your microphone so
it's fine but i'd be a lot more jazzed if there was a usbc to enable a single
cable connection to my laptop finally there's the stand the height adjust
feels really smooth it's got tilt and even the less common pivot but curiously
it doesn't swivel i mean this is not a deal breaker for me because you can just
turn the whole thing and usually you would sit right in front of your monitor
so it'll be perfectly aligned and everything it's just
and there's no RGB for gamers another weird omission okay i was mostly kidding
about that last one because on the whole these little concessions did result in a
significantly lower price tag the pre-order price for this puppy is 4.99
which given the feature set feels very reasonable so overall i think this is a
great monitor with all the core features that a gamer cares about and even a few
that they don't so thanks for watching guys if the video sucked you know what
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