now I've seen many videos of people using these huge OLED displays as monitors and my first
thought every time is that looks like a recipe for a neck injury that is a lot of head movement the
look from one side to the other so when LG reached out offering to send over this Ultra
gear 48 that refers to the inch its size of the thing 48 GQ 900 thank you very much
algae by the way for sending it over I was like yeah I'm very much in the market for a
neck injury so send it over and we'll see if bigger is indeed always better
thank you now my first conundrum is how do you open it usually with TV packaging you
kind of undo a thing at the bottom and then you lift the Box off is that how this works
oh this now judging by the condition of the packaging it does look like this box
was shipped using a pack of feral wolves maybe with a bit of rabies
oh wow that was a lot of static in terms of accessories we get some
cables screws for the stand I'm assuming and then in here
that is actually a really smart remote for a gaming monitor it's
kind of elevated on the back so it can stand on your desk
and then you've got this wheel to navigate the menus with and then all of the important
buttons especially the one that says game on it that's the only one that really matters
oh you know what they say the hexagon is the gameriest shape okay that's a bit of a problem
this is very much not a North American plug but LG sent this one from Korea obviously a
retail version will have the correct plug in terms of IO this thing is excellent we've got
a DisplayPort three HDMI ports Optical and then a USB hub thing so yeah that's that's all the
ports you could possibly need very good a very algae stand that is metal and feels very sturdy
that is the longest screw ever damn
I like that you can cover up this stand mounting with more hexagons it's very nice
whoa it is easily dominating the big desk that it's standing on it's clearly had its Wheaties
now in terms of stand it's a lot more reasonable than the stand on LG's OLED TVs which have like a
protruding back bit whereas this you can get much closer to a wall for example which makes a lot
of sense considering that this is a monitor and not a TV there is also a Vasa mount on the back
if you do want to mount it on a wall which again would kind of make sense although a problem that
I foresee with wall mounting this is that all of the ports kind of Point straight out as opposed to
down so you may have a bit of a problem in terms of plugging this rear i o in when you have the
monitor wall mounted that's really cool there's a headphone jack right on the bottom chin of it we
also got what looks like lighting like I'm pretty sure these are LED bars we'll see if they light
up when we actually fire the monitor up but yeah that's actually a nice much you know it can give
you some some Ambiance now before we fire up the big boy let me quickly tell you about the
specs because they are quite impressive we have that over compensatingly massive 4K 48 inch OLED
panel and aside from their Inky blacks oleds also offer very low pixel response times which should
make for a very Snappy gaming display if you can get the input latency under control it also
has up to 138 Hertz refresh rate with g-sync so yeah those are some pretty serious gaming
credentials for this massive display but as the Great Dane asked the Chihuahua is it too massive
foreign but immediately there was a bit of a problem it's not responding to the remote at all
oh that is some big Windows the remote still isn't working I don't think I have backup AAA batteries
so we'll have to test that a little bit later battery issue aside super epine desktop usage
was not quite as glorious as I was expecting some of the apps clearly don't like being stretched to
this big yeah text doesn't look doesn't look great even with more reasonable scaling text is less
sharp than a dollar store carving knife 4K sounds big but over 48 inch then gives you a pixels per
inch of just 92 which is a reasonable amount less than 1440p at 27 inch which considering how close
you sit to a monitor compared to a TV on the desktop you can really tell but before we try
gaming on this Beast a quick note on the setup just for reference I set the monitor up as far
back as it'll go on this Ikea sit-stand desk which is by no means a narrow desk and when I'm sitting
in front of the monitor I'm a decent distance away from it and I think the monitor is as far back as
most people can reasonably get a monitor away from them with that it's time for gaming it's because
you've got a big monitor doesn't mean you're going to not miss every shot I I hit him like once what
whatever the setting is now we'll figure it out later but the input lag is amazing like it is
such a Snappy feeling monitor holy crap you can't feel the monitor at all actually I mean I think
motion blur is on it took me a while to get over just how responsive this display feels but despite
being one of the snappiest gaming experiences I've ever had something felt off about the movement
until I started playing around with field of view settings yeah the wider fov makes a big difference
so I'm at 75 now and I I kind of like it here it could be wider but 75 is much better than what it
was before initially the fov was set to 55 which was way too cropped in it's hard to explain but
movement kind of looked like I was being sucked through a wormhole but with a wider fov it was
way better and after that Revelation Anna brought me some fresh AAA batteries there we go it does
actually work now which let me explore all of the interesting settings in this monitor like
Ultra and Ultra Ultra wide mode this seems like a really useful setting I then tried playing two
rounds of DOTA to see how the monitor handles that and considering all the looking around I
had to do by the end of it my neck was howling so my suspicions were confirmed the massive display
is not ideal for Marathon DOTA but I don't really think that's what it's for so I decided to change
gears a little it works very well for this kind of thing like honestly compared to just like a normal
monitor oh oh louder I was really distracted there compared to like a normal monitor this is
so much more hectic now I know I sound very unenthused here but it's just because I was so
captivated by The Experience playing more casual games like Forza 5 or no man's Sky while sitting
back with an Xbox controller is really awesome on this display and I think this kind of thing
is its primary use case playing Esports on it in my experience is just a recipe for a neck injury
like it's it's quite hard to argue against it I'm not gonna lie like it's it's pretty badass
I I think the part of it I like the most is the oledness like I can't wait for OLED displays to
become more commonplace in terms of like desktop displays because OLED is a technology is just so
good it's just so so pretty you know so Perna I then thought of a great way to step it up a notch
I think we're we're very quickly approaching Peak gaming here oh
airplane oh every time it's so jarring when you get shot the combination of the massive
beautiful display with the crazy speakers is amazing the more I gained on it the more I
liked the monitor But to answer my initial question do I think a gaming monitor can be
too big yes it can and this one definitely is playing specific games on it may be physically
arousing but the moment you want to spend like an hour doing something that doesn't
just require you to focus on the center of the display unless you're sitting like nine feet
away from it it genuinely hurts your neck so yeah I'd say it's a bit of a niche product which kind
of makes it like the gaming monitor equivalent of a Pagani Zonda it may be a borderline erotic
way of getting up and down in Alpine pass but I wouldn't want a parallel park one
foreign