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Our review of the ASUS ROG Strix OLED XG27AQDMG is now live. This is a unique screen, featuring a 240Hz 2560 x 1440 (QHD or 1440p) LG Display WOLED panel with glossy screen surface (‘coating’). Unlike QD-OLED models, there isn’t a distinct lightening up of dark shades in brighter lighting conditions or accompanying colourful tints across the entire screen when that happens. On the other hand the anti-reflective properties aren’t as strong, so reflections can become more of an issue (lighting must be even more carefully controlled). And there’s a bit of a grainy look to the screen surface when observing lighter content rather than things appearing completely smooth. You’d usually see this absolute grain-free smoothness on glossy monitor screens, including QD-OLEDs. Still, the screen does not have the same ‘layering’ as a matte screen surface and it’s very much a glossy screen surface.

Aside from this the monitor offers a pretty solid entertainment experience and is well priced – in particular it offers a very fluid 240Hz gaming experience. With very low input lag and the usual visually instantaneous OLED pixel responses. The way ASUS implements their sRGB setting should be commended as it allows full adjustment including brightness, gamma settings and colour channels. Whether clamping the gamut to sRGB or using the full native gamut, there were some slight issues with gamma for darker shades which masked some dark detail. This couldn’t be appropriately corrected in the OSD without significantly upsetting the image, though setting gamma to ‘2.0’ improved this to a degree but not completely.

Under HDR the full brightness capability is achieved with brightness set to ‘100’. With this there were some slight issues with dark detail masking (less pronounced than under SDR), with the PQ curves optimised for the default setting of ’90’. Whether using ‘100’ or ’90’, the usual WOLED caveats with low colour volume (inability for a given subpixel to show high brightness and strong saturation) at the same time applied, given the use of an unfiltered white subpixel to provide the brightness. Though the screen was capable of decent HDR brightness and the ABL behaviour wasn’t as aggressive as QD-OLED using their ‘HDR Peak 1000’ style setting. There isn’t the same level of medium shade dimming where bright shades dominate that occurs on QD-OLED using an ‘HDR Peak 1000’ type setting, either. So overall a unique experience and one some will very much enjoy.

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