- Back in January,
Eve said that their upcoming monitor, the Eve Spectrum
would be the world's first 240 Hertz, 1440P,
one millisecond, IPS display with 750 units of brightness,
as well as 135 Watts of power delivery for your devices
all for a disruptive price.
And well, this is the problem
with kick-starting technology products, isn't it?
Because what sounds space age today is commodity tomorrow.
And here we are 11 months later having reviewed
multiple 240 Hertz IPS monitors, including more than one,
that's 1440P resolution or higher.
So then is their sales pitch still compelling
as we head into 2021?
And can Eve overcome their tainted history
to make the product a buy rather than a beware?
We're gonna find out, brought to you by Ting.
Ting is a customer-focused mobile provider
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Learn more at the end of this video or at the link below.
(upbeat music)
Not so far, all I've managed to open is the stand
but it looks and feels pretty metal as the kids say.
And presumably it will be a part of whichever monitor
you decide to order.
So there's the Spectrum QHD, so it's 1440P
that runs at 144 Hertz for 440 bucks.
The Spectrum QHD 240 Hertz and the Spectrum 4K 144 Hertz.
That last one is the one we have
which is actually kind of unfortunate
because I was a little more interested
in the 240 Hertz QHD model.
All of them are using LG IPS panels
and the QHD seemed to use the same panel as the LG 27GL850
while the 4K model probably uses the same panel
as the LG 27GN950.
That is their only 4K 144 Hertz.
Of course, this is all according to what Eve says,
and Eve does not have a spotless record for delivering
exactly what they say, when they say they're going to do it.
Of course, that doesn't stop us from being curious
about their progress on the Spectrum
which is why we've agreed to take a look
at what is an early unit to give us an idea
of what the industrial design is gonna look like.
According to Eve, this is something that we can count on.
Hopefully what the performance is going to be like
for anyone who either backs or buys this monitor
once it's just normally available.
Okay, documentation time.
What the devil?
Yeah, they emailed saying this was out of date.
So here's the real one.
You've got a 10 gigabit per second uplink.
That's the USB type C on the bottom.
The two type A's are both 10 gigabit per second.
The one type C on the side is also 10 gigabit per second.
And finally the type B is just a regular upstream
five gigabyte per second according to the latest spec sheet.
Power bricks in here, kinda cool idea for the packaging.
That's neat.
It's pretty beefy, but you would expect that from something
that has to power not only itself,
but I don't know the numbers are all over the place
but at least a hundred Watts of external device.
Apparently, HDMI 2.1 is not yet working in our early units.
So that's not something
that we're going to try to do for now.
Apparently it wants to DisplayPort connection.
So we'll see how that goes.
If this doesn't immediately work,
we're throwing it in the garbage, just kidding display
port it's a terrible connector
and it could necessitate a reboot.
That whole split down the middle thing on 4K monitors
used to be a thing
back when they were using two panel displays
and like display port multi-stream technology.
But I thought this was supposed
to be using display stream compression
to a single tile display.
So I'm a little confused.
Let's just double check and see if we even have the 4K one.
Yes, we do.
James.
- [James] What's up?
- Did both sides of it looked different
when you hooked it up?
- [James] Uh oh.
- So this is our second unit actually,
the first one had a broken joystick,
so we couldn't navigate the menu properly,
which wouldn't have been a huge problem,
except that the up direction didn't work on the joystick.
And it was set to the minimum brightness out of the box.
So we couldn't turn the brightness up.
Now, this one you have gotta be kidding me.
Only down and right work.
I'm just gonna reboot, what?
I think the menu is completely frozen.
I think we just blue screens, the monitors onscreen display.
I mean, not blue, strictly speaking whatever,
you guys know what I'm talking about.
I don't think I've ever seen this before.
We just locked up a monitor firmware.
Okay, so let's try this again, oh my God.
Okay, no, that's not what I wanted to do.
I don't really know what to say at this point.
Hold on a second.
Did switching to HDR make the line go, ooh?
Is it there but just less noticeable?
No, I think it's gone, fine, screw it.
Let's game in HDR at 4K, 144 Hertz.
Okay, well that's weird.
Do you see that shadow down the middle now?
Now there are a handful of issues that Eve was aware
that we would find them this unit, like the housing,
tolerances are not yet final.
The firmware's obviously early.
The USB-C port does not charge devices correctly yet,
but what they do told us is that in terms of performance,
this was supposed to be very close to what customers
will eventually receive.
At least in terms of color accuracy.
They've still got some work to do
with apparently the blur busters folks
which is somewhat promising to me
to get their emotion blur reduction like really down pat.
And they claim these monitors from the calibrated
at the factory for Delta-E of less than two in P3 standard
and at a D65 white point.
A spoiler alert,
if this is supposed to be a Delta-E of less than two
we don't seem to be quite there yet.
HDR performance is apparently something
that they're still tweaking and some good news
is that I don't see that dark stain down the middle
of the screen when we're out of the menu.
Oh, you know what?
It's got full screen dimming on right now.
Wait, what just happened?
It's supposed to be off.
Okay, now just a sec.
It's clearly on, right Brandon?
Like when I opened the menu,
the entire screen clearly gets brighter.
Okay, so this it's not supposed
to have dinning enabled though.
See, backlight dinning is supposed to be off.
So let's just this broken menu,
yeah strangely G-Sync doesn't show up at all.
So it doesn't even allow me to force it.
One other thing we can test is whether
my laptop will charge,
right now they say the main problem is compatibility.
So some devices should actually work even on this early unit
for charging, mine does not.
This is the bottom one, right?
Yeah, okay, oh whatever, you know what?
What's the worst that can happen for my laptop?
PC isn't charging, use the recommended charger and cable
and make sure it's directly plugged in.
All right, fair enough.
The correct way to evaluate a display
using the Blur Busters UFO Test is not with your eyes
but I've looked at it enough times
that it gives me a rough idea to just look at it.
And I can tell you guys now
that there's no kind of blur reduction enabled whatsoever.
Yeah, okay, okay, overdrive off.
So let's try, let's see if that helps at all.
'Cause I just don't think any of this is doing anything.
The plan today was to pull out the high-speed camera
and shoot 1000 FPS footage of this, so that we could really
evaluate its motion blur performance.
'Cause that's one of the things that's so great
about the LG monitor that's based on this same panel,
but this is so far off that there'd be no point
even evaluating it.
- [Brandon] When are they shipping this thing?
- I mean, I don't know, but not soon.
Moving on to color then, we know that this panel is capable
of excellent performance,
which means it comes down to calibration,
unfortunately compared to the LG GN950,
it's not even close in spite of Eve telling us
that this unit was supposed to be pretty representative
of the color accuracy of a finished model.
Now it's better than the one
that was locked at zero brightness,
but I wouldn't use it for any kind of color accurate work.
Whereas the LG out of the box was pretty darn close.
So then, here's our problem.
Going back to the original sales pitch,
everything looks great.
And honestly, there's a lot here that's really promising.
It's very compelling value if they actually deliver
on all those selling points.
But this is the issue with backing tech products
on Kickstarter.
Back when they announced this monitor,
it seemed like unbelievable.
And now the timeline has slipped,
I mean, this project began in earnest in March, 2019
to the point where there's competing products
that you can all ready buy.
If this actually ships on their estimated date,
which is February, 2021, I will be (beeping sound) floored,
like this unit right here
there's a manufacturing date on the back, December, 2020.
They just made this and it's just not close.
It's not close at all.
But with that said, remember how I said
you could sort of buy competing products?
Let's talk about that.
For high refresh rate IPS monitors.
We've got the Acer Predator XG17
that runs at 240 Hertz and the ASUS PG259Q,
which actually runs at a whopping 360 Hertz.
But those aren't really quite comparable
because they only run it 1080P whereas 1440P
which should theoretically be available
at up to 240 Hertz with the need spectrum
is much, much finer looking.
Now, as for 1440P 240 Hertz,
there is the Samsung Odyssey G7,
but it maxes out at 600 units peak brightness.
It's sold out basically everywhere,
though in theory, you could get it for as little as $550
and it's curved, which not everyone is into.
There's the Samsung Odyssey G9,
that one's also 240 Hertz, 1440P, but is super wide,
also curved and is a $1,000 dollars.
Now, as for direct competitors, for this guy right here,
4K 144 Hertz.
Well, LG all ready has the 27GN950 it's $800,
has RGB on the back, which is cool,
but it has no power delivery.
No, HDMI 2.1, so if you have a gaming PC
and the next gen console say in your dorm room
or something like that 'cause you're a baller student
or whatever, and you wanna hook them both up
to the same display, well, you'll get the best experience
with something that does have HDMI 2.1,
and it's sold out everywhere and is going for anywhere
from 1,100 to $1,400 on eBay.
Damn you scalpers.
And finally ASUS has announced an HDMI 2.1 43-inch monitor,
but they are also not shipping that yet.
So time could be more on each side
than we originally thought, if they can deliver,
which is kind of the biggest elephant in the room
because Eve's got a bit of a history.
The Eve V was a Windows 10, two in one that very favorably
to Microsoft Surface Pro while costing considerably less.
Unfortunately, Eve tech couldn't produce
or fulfill enough orders to meet the demand
and many backers received their devices months
or even years after they placed their orders.
It just kind of points to them,
not necessarily having a perfect track record
when it comes to supply chain management
and following through, which sort of raises the question.
I see a lot of potential here, but the concern for me
is that they were so eager to send me something
that's not quite ready that it gives me concerns
about the business side of things.
Do they have enough funding
to actually do the production runs
or do they need more pre-orders, for example?
And I have no way of answering that question for you.
So if it actually lives up to the specs
that they say it will have, looks pretty freaking sick to me
but it remains to be seen if it will,
just like it remains to be seen
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If you guys are looking
for our kinda current king of gaming monitors right now,
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Okay, not a monitor per se, but it's pretty freaking sick.