LG has priced up its 32-inch UltraGear OLED monitor (LG 32GS95UE-B) which offers a ‘Dual Mode’ – a nifty trick indeed – and this screen won’t come cheap.
The price of this possible entrant to our list of the best gaming monitors is $1,400 at the LG store in the US (around £1,100, or AU$2,150) as noticed by VideoCardz.
What’s the mentioned trick? Well, the dual mode operation is facilitated by a hotkey, and it allows the user to change the panel between two different resolutions and refresh rates.
There’s a 4K mode at a refresh rate of 240Hz, designed for content creation or watching videos, or single player gaming – but if you’re engaging in competitive gaming, then you can switch to the other mode. This offers a 1080p resolution with a 480Hz refresh rate.
As well as that, the 32-inch UltraGear is a quality display in many respects, not the least of which is that it sports an (anti-glare) OLED panel with DisplayHDR TrueBlack 400 and up to 98.5% coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut.
The 32-inch UltraGear supports Nvidia’s G-Sync and AMD’s FreeSync Premium Pro, and has a 0.03ms response time (gray-to-gray).
LG’s OLED monitor also comes with integrated speakers and a further innovation is that these are located behind the screen, a bit like the setup with some Sony TVs for example. It’s called ‘Pixel Sound’ and means the audio is directly aimed at the player with a fuller, richer sound than traditional monitor speakers.
Expect LG’s 32-inch UltraGear OLED to ship next month, perhaps on April 15 VideoCardz suggests, but it’ll be coming soon. Indeed, as the tech site pointed out, there are reviews of the monitor on the LG store now, so some PC gamers have got one already somehow – even though it’s marked as on pre-order (at the time of writing).
Analysis: Hmm… refresh rate and resolution cake…
This is a pricey proposition for a 32-inch monitor, but it’s an innovative screen boasting some nice tricks, and it ticks a lot of boxes for people because of that – and the simple fact that it’s 4K resolution and a flat (16:9) screen at this size (rather than curved). Not everyone wants curved or ultra-wide (or often both go together), of course.
At any rate, it was never going to be cheap, and the ability to have your cake and eat it, in terms of a competitive gaming screen, and a single player experience, changing with the sample tap of a key, is undeniably cool.
If you’re wondering why the 1080p mode is good for competitive gaming, it’s because at that resolution, one of the best graphics cards will have no trouble driving blisteringly fast and smooth frame rates. With that refresh rate upped to 480Hz, in theory you can hit 480 frames per second, if your GPU is good enough (and the game isn’t too demanding) at 1080p.
At 4K, well, obviously, you’re not going to need that sort of refresh rate, so it’s lowered to a more typical 240Hz (though that’s clearly still a very fluid level of gameplay if you can get to that at such a high resolution).
The Pixel Sound seems pretty smart on the audio front, too. Usually monitors deliver a pathetic attempt at audio, if they even make any attempt at all, but this sounds (ahem) like it could deliver the goods nicely for an integrated speaker solution.
Although we have to say, we worry slightly about potential longer-term side-effects of having sound vibrating through the panel. Well, we say worry, but we have a Sony OLED TV that does this, and it didn’t stop us buying it. Although we use a Sonos soundbar more often than not, rather than the built-in TV sound. Anyway, time will tell, and that’s our own personal small slice of paranoia around whole-screen-speakers, take or it leave it.
