- Today, we've got a bit of a special treat.
Corsair sponsored this video
and they hand-delivered us their new Corsair Xeneon Flex.
Can you guess what its cool one-party trick is?
(upbeat music)
Oh, my God!
(Nicholas laughs)
It's an OLED panel and it can bend up to 800R curvature.
This thing is insane.
I don't know about you guys,
but I've been watching OLED for a long, long time.
And one of the original things
that was a big selling point for me
was the fact that it's bendable
and you can flex the panel and stuff.
We're finally there.
We've had bendable phones and foldable phones
for quite a while, several years, actually.
But no one's really done it in a monitor yet
where you can do it yourself.
Yeah, we've got curved screens, those are cool,
but this, this is something else.
(upbeat music)
Oh, my God, it just clicks in place once it's there.
You can also stop this thing
anywhere you want along that curvature.
So say you're doing office work and you're not gaming,
you wanna put it back to flat, 21:9.
But then, all of a sudden, you're done a little early.
It's time to game.
Oh, my God.
And then it just fold (laughs), just folds out.
That's so wild.
It's a 1440p, 21:9, covers 99% of the DCI-P3 color space
and hits 1,000 nits, which, it's crazy.
This thing does 240 hertz.
Absolutely wild.
This is a prototype unit, so nothing is final, final.
The stand is gonna be a little different.
These are gonna be shorter and a little wider.
These handles, by the way,
they are gonna be able to go back into the screen.
But right now, we've just got a prototype unit,
so they kind of have to stay out once they're out.
But we've got pretty good front IO.
We've got two USB 3.2 ports.
We've got a headphone jack.
We have an input button, power button,
and then, this is probably for navigation.
Our OSD is locked today because it's a prototype unit.
They don't want us messing around with anything too much.
So we can basically just change input and power it on.
As for the back, it does 240 hertz, so we've got HDMI 2.1,
2.1, DisplayPort, 1.4, but DP 2.0 isn't here yet, USB-C.
There's two USB-C,
one of them can actually do DisplayPort out,
so if you wanna hook up a laptop really quick or something,
you can totally do that.
Two more USB-A slots and then a power bar.
One of these USB-C is also upstream,
so if you wanna connect it to your PC, no problem at all.
That's why there's no USB-B port, which is kind of crazy.
I've actually been waiting for USB-B to die,
and maybe this is the monitor that finally kills it.
It is a prototype
and this is gonna be mostly the same, probably.
They said the big improvements are gonna be on the handles,
on the firmware, and then, on the stand itself.
This will be shorter and wider.
I think it's fine, personally.
I know if Horst was here, he'd complain.
He's like, "Why is there a contraption
"on the back of my monitor?"
But let's be real, you're gonna set this thing up
and then you're just gonna leave it there.
You're not gonna poke your head around the back.
Unless you've got your office
right in the middle of the room, I think it's totally fine.
If anything, it actually makes me feel a bit more safe
because there's a big support system for the bend.
I still (chuckles) feel a little uncomfortable
when flexing it myself,
but that's kind of just because it's brand new.
I've never really done this before.
As for everything else, it's good.
It's all just blacked out.
There's a small Corsair logo on the back of the stand
and there's a small Corsair logo on the front of the stand.
The one caveat to this
is there is basically no adjustment at all
when it comes to pivot, rotation, height adjustment.
Even mounting it, you actually need,
because all the important brains of this thing
are in this back stand right here.
And there's only a little bit on the panel box right here.
So there's a cable that connects the two.
And what Corsair has said
is that you cannot get a VESA mount for this guy.
You have to either just leave it desk-mounted
or they are selling a little clamp
that'll clamp onto your desk and attach to this guy.
I don't know how that's gonna work.
They haven't shown us or brought it here,
but at least you've got an option.
As you can see, it actually looks pretty good.
But what I wanna know is how does it look turned on?
They actually sent us two,
if you haven't noticed that already.
They were worried that since it's a prototype,
one of them might be a little finicky or it might fail.
So we've got two here today.
And luckily, they're both fine.
This one over here is set up on a Corsair One
that they brought with them.
And we're gonna check out the HDR.
We're gonna game on it.
We're gonna just watch some other content.
Check out the .03 millisecond gray-to-gray response time
thanks to that delicious OLED panel.
Oh, man, I can't wait.
Let's check it out.
The one kind of feature that the stand does have is tilt.
So you can tilt it to your liking, which is great.
They found that the size of the screen
was just the right amount for most people
to be kind of in that sweet spot,
so they're not worried about height adjustment or anything.
They've had tall people.
They've had short people.
They've had average people come in
and daily drive this thing
or at least check it out in the office.
Apparently, it's fine.
Feels pretty comfortable to me.
I've got a 21:9, 1440p ultrawide at home.
It's a little smaller.
Mine's 34 inches, I think, and this is 45.
But still, this is kind of really good, actually.
It's very comfortable, very pleasing to the eyes.
We watched their own HDR content
that they brought with them.
It looked pretty good.
But what I wanna do is do the classics that we always check.
Wow, I can't type on this keyboard at all.
(keyboard clacking)
Just to see how good it really is.
They're promising 1,000 nits peak brightness,
not VESA-certified, but apparently,
they're working with someone else
to set up their own kind of certification process.
I mean, one thing I'm already noticing,
just because it's OLED, is the nice black,
just pure black on either side here
'cause the pixels are just turned straight off.
So that means that everything is going to be a dimming zone.
Every pixel's a dimming zone.
So you're really not gonna beat
something like an OLED in terms of HDR content.
Maybe, even mini-LED on a big TV
is 1,100 zones or something.
Yeah, that looks pretty good, don't get me wrong.
But OLED is 4 million zones or something.
If it's ultrawide, 1440p, then that's eight,
no, it's not 8 million, it's 6 million pixels.
6 million dimming zones.
Oh, my God.
Obviously, we're not measuring or testing anything today,
so I can't verify any sort of claims
about 1,000 nits or anything like that,
but it's getting pretty bright.
Wow, it's already doing 240 hertz.
Yeah, get this, David, look at this.
Look at this.
(upbeat music)
240 hertz.
I know, it's 1440p, it's not 4K 240,
but that is insanely fast for an OLED display.
240 hertz with the microsecond
gray-to-gray pixel response time.
That's wild, I love it.
Even my Alienware monitor at home,
the AW3423DW QD-OLED display,
that thing only does 175 hertz.
And once you go to 175, you don't get 10-bit color anymore.
I wanna see this, now, I asked them while they were here.
I specifically asked them
if this would do 10-bit color at higher refresh rates.
They said, "No."
But I wanna see where we can get away with it.
So a couple things, one, Windows is saying its peak of 565.
Windows is often wrong about this, so don't trust that,
especially when it's brand new firmware
that no one has access to.
But it's saying it's doing 10-bit
and it's saying it's 240 hertz. (laughs)
So whatever, maybe they're gonna do it.
'Cause that's kind of my one problem
with my Alienware monitor
is I've gotta go down to 144 for true 10-bit.
Maybe this is my next display.
I don't know.
But I've been waiting for something like this for so long.
We asked them about price
and they wouldn't give us a direct answer
because this isn't coming out until Q4, maybe Q1 next year.
But we did hazard guesses.
I guessed $2,500.
Geoff said 2,800.
And all they said was that it's lower than that.
They said it's competitive.
If they can get this thing close to two grand,
considering the screen size
and the other capabilities of it, I don't know.
This might be, basically,
the best game monitor on the market
because, yep, he's just crisp.
One minor complaint is that it's not G-SYNC Ultimate,
but it is G-SYNC compatible
and it's got AMD FreeSync Premium.
So the variable refresh rate on this
is gonna be pretty good.
And the reality is I can't see any issues
when following this UFO across.
One of the benefits to buying a Corsair product
is that if you're already in their product suite of iCUE,
boom, this thing will do it.
I don't think there's any RGB on the back.
- [Bell] Good. - Nope, definitely not.
Hey, I don't mind back RGB.
But you can control stuff from a single hub.
Probably the OSD stuff as well.
We don't have access to that, like I said earlier.
But it's a pretty cool feature
if you actually already use iCUE.
It's just icing on the cake.
Okay, now, I gotta game.
Can I game yet?
Oh, it looks good already.
I gotta be the cool-looking T-side guy.
Give me, oh, you got some skins, right?
- [Bell] Looks great, yeah.
- And look at this.
Look at this.
Oh. - [Bell] Now, this is gaming.
- Oh, okay.
I died right away, that's okay.
Sorry, thanks, Bert.
But it's pretty clear.
Could be, yeah, it could be a little clearer.
Now, that being said, though,
there is a ton of firmware updates and stuff
for them to make to this panel.
This is a super early prototype.
So I only expect it to get better.
And the reality is, man, it still looks pretty good.
My current monitor is the AW3423DW, the QD-OLED guy.
And I gotta say,
this is the first time I might actually be tempted to swap.
It's got more of a glossy look to it.
Not so much anti-glare,
but the reality is I kind of like that anyway
'cause the colors really pop.
it's an anti-reflective coating with low blue light.
And honestly, it looks pretty good.
It doesn't look like colors are desaturated
or anything like that.
It looks just crisp.
Okay, "Counter-Strike" is great.
It's great, but we gotta do something
a little more cinematic
to show off this amazing ultrawide HDR experience here.
The one kind of big drawback to this is that it's 1440p.
So you've got a 45-inch ultrawide display running 1440p,
and I've already said that 32 inches, 16:9
is kind of the max you should run 1440p.
This is something around 84 PPI, at this point,
and for gaming, it's okay.
I do think that when you get a little closer,
you can kind of start to get a bit of a screen door effect.
But gaming and watching regular content,
I think it's perfectly fine.
The problem you're gonna run into is
if you're some kind of designer,
which is really unfortunate,
'cause this thing would be great for like,
oh, I wanna game, and you pull it out.
And then, oh, I wanna design stuff, and you put it back.
Or maybe even designing on curved, I don't know.
But that is easily the biggest downfall
is that this is unfortunately not 4K.
However, 4K, 240 hertz ultrawide,
I don't even think that's a thing yet.
So Corsair has really kind of outdone themselves
with this guy.
Here's another super cool feature that they mentioned.
You don't want just one of these.
No, no, no.
You want two of them because.
(monitor clicks)
(upbeat music)
Oh, yeah, I feel like it should bend more.
Okay, whatever.
You want two of them because what you can do
is you can take one side and only curve that one side,
and then you can put another monitor up next to it
and curve the other side and make a full,
180-degree cockpit view, which is just super cool.
So you can have a flat wind screen
and then curved windows that kind of wing out the sides.
I can't wait.
The HDR on this thing is fantastic.
And the reality is, too, with 99% of the DCI-P3 color space,
this doesn't come pre-calibrated out of the factory,
but it does have access to that whole gamut.
So if you have a colorimeter or something at home,
you can absolutely color correct this thing yourself
to make it dead on.
There are always concerns with OLED about burn-in.
And there's also a lot of concerns
with monitors in general about dead pixels.
The really cool thing is Corsair is offering,
very similar to Dell's warranty
with the three year anti-burn-in stuff.
It's got a three-year warranty
that covers both burn-in and dead pixels.
Pretty much the two banes of OLED monitors.
So you don't have to worry.
It is sponsored,
but I honestly think this thing is pretty nice.
I'm waiting to see what they can do with the firmware
to really make the panel shine.
But honestly, once this thing comes out
in a few quarters or whatever,
there's a good chance I'm gonna get it.
I just upgraded my display and I already need a new upgrade.
Thanks for watching "Short Circuit."
This is the Corsair Xeneon Flex.
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Thanks for watching.