[sblantipodi]

MSI MPG 321URX is finally here. I had some time to test it with various contents…
I tested various games and films, various photos and videos.

I have mixed feelings…
There are scenes where the OLED panel is stunning compared to the MiniLED and scenes where the MiniLED is much better.

Dark scenes where there are small details are way better on the OLED,
“you can feel the millions of zones”, but that scenes are very limited in most games,
I mean, how many scenes like that you can count?

Some games like Cyberpunk 2077 looks way worse to me on OLED than on X32.

Brightness limiter kicks in often in daylight scenes and there are some zones where the shadows are too dark on OLED, they are so dark around brighter objects that you can’t see them. This is somewhat similar to the black crush I had with the VA monitor some years ago.
VA was not able to reproduce that shadows, OLED is very able to do it, but nearby brighter objects simply doesn’t let you see the shadows.
It’s difficult to explain to me but Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example for that and for my tastes it looks much better on the MiniLED panel.
This happens when there are shadows in a well lit scene or where there are bight objects nearby a dark object with shadows.

More in general it seems that the games are “not mastered” with OLEDs in mind and that this black crush happen more often that what I would have tought.

With OLEDs, you must play in a complete dark room because the average brightness is not enough to appreciate all the details otherwise,
this is not really true with the MiniLED.

Color wise, OLED is more “colorful” but it’s like if the colors lacks the white part, even this concept is somewhat difficult to explain to me.

Calibrating the monitor for “a color accurate work” is difficult due to the brightness limiter that constantly kicks in.

I use the monitor at 250/cd m2 during day and this is clearly not possible on OLED since it needs it’s full blast to achieve that brightness in the day on SDR.

I appreciate the added smoothness of the OLED, I can feel it with GSYNC when the framerate goes under 120FPS.

I can see the sharpness difference between the MiniLED and the OLED but I need to be sincere, I need to look at it to get the difference.

All in all my impression is not positive at all, there are scenes where the OLED is clearly superior,
on average this is not the case for my tastes.

I must admit that I must be wrong since everyone this days is going crazy for OLEDs,
I feel like when there was people abandoning the mighty CRTs like the Sony Trinitron for crappy LCDs.
At the end, LCDs became better than CRTs but in reality this transition lasted a lot of years, in the brain of people this transition was an instant.

I was trying to make a video comparison of both the monitors side by side but I don’t have a camera good enough,
for this reason I searched something similar on YT and I found this video that shows more or less what I’m experiencing on my desk.

https://youtu.be/sRGwzbnuLJA?si=1YYD7_LufKKS0po2

For now I am going to use the monitor for some more days, I will then give it to my wife and see if she likes it for her 3D rendering,
if no one likes it, I will return it 🙂

[PCM2]

Hi again sblantipodi,

I think this one deserves its own thread as those are some very interesting thoughts you’ve shared. This certainly isn’t about being “right” or “wrong” about liking one technology more than the other. They definitely have their own distinct strengths and weaknesses and if on balance you prefer Mini LED that doesn’t make you “wrong” in any way. I also miss the bright scene (or even ‘bright dominant’) performance of Mini LED models when using OLED monitors, but for dark shades I find the representation very good. And it certainly isn’t the case that games are somehow “not optimised” for OLED in that sense. The PQ EOTF tracking of QD-OLED models like the MSI MPG 321URX is exceptionally accurate for dark shades. Coupled with the per-pixel illumination, the monitor is displaying those shadow details exactly as intended – assuming you’ve set any in-game calibration slider(s) appropriately.

Whilst it may be ‘technically’ displaying things in an appropriate way, that doesn’t account for perceptive factors or personal preferences for how such details might be represented. For example, any ambient light in the room that’s striking the screen surface on QD-OLED will cause a loss of dark detail by elevating the shade depth and ‘crushing’ things together for that reason. I know from your own projects you’re very much aware of the importance of appropriate room lighting, so this is just a general point which may not apply here.

With the ability of QD-OLED to display rather bright smaller highlights with an immediate transition to deep darker shades, it also means you’re not observing the “lifting up” of dark shades surrounding bright shades that you’d get on a Mini LED monitor. It’s not that the QD-OLED is displaying those dark shades in an inappropriate or overly masked way, but rather that the Mini LED monitor is showing some of those shades in an elevated (less masked than intended) way due to the much more limited dimming precision. But with your eyes being bombarded by the strong shade brightness of those bright elements, you become handicapped in your ability to discern small dark details – the elevation of some darker shades as you can observe with Mini LED solutions can actually help overcome that phenomenon.

[sblantipodi]

I think that we can write a book with every answer you give us on the forum.
Thanks for bringing light on this wonderful topic,

I’ll do some more tests and I’ll see if my eyes can accomodate “this way” of experiencing contents.

[M2077]

Heh, and so I return here again after a long while, with another overthinking of monitor choices! 😀

Long story short, I am in conflict between the Alienware AW3225QF, the LG 27GR95UM, and the TCL 27R83U (also known as the FFALCON/Thunderbird U8 in Asia), and not really sure what to go with.

The Alienware has good SDR, good HDR minus brightness, and insane response time. On the other hand, whatever I’ll get will be used for combined WFH (coding and reading, so lots of static) and gaming with a worst case of 10+ hours of usage per day, which makes me nervous about OLED for now, hence I began looking into MiniLED options. Furthermore, I am not sure how I’ll feel about the curve. However, it looks very mild in all footage I saw so I don’t think this is overall a negative. Availability is also really scarce for this one (and other OLEDs) but it does drop every now and then on Amazon.

The LG is a contender for _very_ strong SDR, reviews praise its SDR quality a lot, and it even has nicely working local dimming on SDR. It also has the fancy new ATW polarizer. However, LG seems to have messed up the HDR LD algorithm and apparently the monitor has some sort of inverse ABL system that can’t be disabled and there’s also weird blooming (that is blue-ish rather than normal FALD blooming). In fact, some say that SDR + LD provides a better image than HDR + LD for most content which is just weird. And LG don’t really do any marketing for it, and they haven’t done any updates beyond a single one earlier this year which makes me worry this is basically abandoned by LG.

The TCL seems to have really powerful HDR, with a good local dimming algorithm in both SDR and HDR, and it’s also H-VA so it has good contrast out of the box, but I am not sure about response time (seems for most colors it’s almost as fast as old, slow IPS panels but for grey transitions it’s still a bit slow?) and uniformity. I am also not sure about the color coverage vs the others, but the reviews I saw (which were sadly not that much), all pointed to 91 – 95% DCI-P3. Overall, it seems to be a great HDR monitor but I wonder if SDR experience will be worse than the other options, especially given that most of the time will be spent in SDR anyway.

Like I said, main usage is a general all-rounder that will be used for combined WFH and gaming. Ideally, I’d like both strong SDR and HDR, but given monitors are all about compromise, I don’t mind compromising… issue is, which is the “safer bet”? Do I go for the OLED and see how long it lasts, or just go for good SDR in the LG, or try my luck and see how good/bad the TCL ends up being for general usage?
This will be bought from Amazon and imported, which means that I don’t really get warranty beyond 30 days, so I need to choose carefully (and while I can return something if I don’t like it, I’d rather not as it’s going to be a bit of a painful process with large things like monitors).

Prices also make things a bit difficult. Including shipping, import, etc, I am left with this:
TCL 27R83U – $1.52k
LG 27GR95UM – $1.68k
Alienware AW3225QF – $1.7k
PG32UCDM/LG32GS/any 32″ flat OLED – $2.2k – 2.4k (which is why I didn’t take any of these into account; $700+ premium over MiniLED/curved QD OLED is just too much)

[PCM2]

Welcome back!

I think the AW3225QF is a great monitor for a mixture of gaming and productivity – but that mixture would have to be biased much more towards the gaming side of things or general entertainment use. If you’re using the monitor predominantly for productivity within those 10+ hours and you’re doing that day in day out then it’s definitely a matter of time before you experience burn-in. And probably not as long as you’d want! If you had peace of mind of being able to make use of the warranty after a while to swap the monitor out after experiencing an annoying level of burn-in it wouldn’t be so bad, but you don’t have the luxury.

I’m also gauging your workflow as being productivity first (for most of that 10 hours) followed by a bit of gaming for relaxation afterwards. If I’d been working on a computer all day I wouldn’t personally want to use HDR because it is simply more fatiguing than using SDR. With that said (and I agree with the points you made about it) the LG 27GR95UM would really be the ‘safest’ choice and should give a solid SDR experience at least. I believe it has adjustable brightness under SDR with the local dimming enabled, so you can also use it to deepen dark shades without blasting fatigued eyes with high brightness. Although expect it to drag down some of the medium shades surrounding those dark shades down and mask some detail in certain scenes. And although I haven’t seen the data, I have no doubt the TCL would have the usual obvious sluggish VA transitions where dark shades are involved. It’s subjective of course, but it’s something I personally find rather annoying.

[M2077]

Thank you!

Yeah that is an accurate measure. 7 – 8 hours of work, then the rest for gaming and general entertainment. What alerted me mainly was Tim from MonitorUnboxed’s testing, where there was barely noticeable burn in on his unit in just 3 months for a usage pattern similar to mine (although I would use dark mode, hide taskbar, and put the refresh to 4 hours, I wouldn’t expect these messures to double or triple the longevity, which is what I feel would be reasonable given 3 months is not a whole lot)

Thanks for the suggestion! Yeah the LG is fully configurable under SDR which is nice. It is only under HDR where options get locked out. Honestly it all around sounded like the best option, but the HDR performance had me hesitant. I hadn’t experienced HDR before and wanted to jump in and see what the hype is about, so I was worried the poor performance would make it feel bad. (There’s also the question of HDR viability on PC.. there is a lot of jank on the software side (e.g., Elden Ring, one of the HDR supporting games in my library only has HDR under exclusive full screen, and you lose it when you alt tab and need to turn it off then on again) and not many titles support it yet, with poor implementations around too)

Regarding the TCL, yeah, ideally I would rather avoid smearing/trails (specially since I got used to proper smooth transitions from my Q27G2S/D). I don’t play competitive games but smears in normal usage/browsing/gaming would be very irritating. There sadly aren’t that many reviews around.. this is the most comprehensive: https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1792929667709691606 (Chinese, but auto translate works well) and while the average transition time looks quite fast (specially for VA) under the middle overdrive setting, those dark grey transition numbers worry me (can also be faintly seen in the ufotest picture, on the top background which is dark cyan-ish). It does get impressively bright though.

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