- [Linus] A portion of this video
is sponsored by Adobe Photoshop Lightroom,
watch to the end to learn more.
There are two types of displays,
those for consuming content and those for creating it.
And while they have a lot in common,
there are some key ways that they differ
with the main one being color gamut.
You're probably already aware that a wider color gamut
means your display can recreate a broader range of colors,
but what exactly are sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3.
And why have creative types been spending tens of thousands
of dollars on monitors that have more of them?
Could this be the game changer that stops all that,
turning those expensive beasts into dinosaurs?
And can we game on it even if we're not really supposed to?
Yes.
Yes, of course we will.
If you guessed that the RGB stands for red, green, blue,
you're right.
Standard RGB or sRGB was created back in 1996
by HP and Microsoft.
And it's basically our default color space,
used for monitors, printers,
and just about anything you look at online.
But sRGB being 25 years old at this point,
wasn't the most forward-looking standard.
And we've come a long way.
Think of the color spectrum like a rainbow
and sRGB kind of like a small sampling
of those available colors.
Speaking of colors, the northern lights desk pad,
finally back in stock, pick yours up today at lttstore.com.
Well, that's where the newer big boy
color space has come in,
adding more and more of the human visible spectrum.
So a monitor with full coverage
of the DCI-P3 color space, for example,
can display a colored gamut about 25% wider than sRGB.
But that's also where the problems come in.
Because when a piece of content is created
or mastered in one color space and then consumed on a device
that doesn't properly support it,
you can end up with over-saturated
or unnatural looking colors.
Now the obvious solution
would be to just have content creators
use calibrated versions of the same cheapo monitors
that we use at home.
But that introduces a whole host of other problems.
Like how could they adjust a color
that their camera captured,
but their display cannot represent?
How can they ensure that their masterpiece will look right
on a higher fidelity screen, like in the cinema?
That's why colorists demand superior displays
which for film work can easily reach 30 or $40,000.
Now obviously for smaller content creators
or even small studios that kind of cost is out of reach.
And that is where the 32EP950 comes in from LG.
It features a 4K OLED panel
for blacks that are completely devoid of light.
Remember, the individual pixels can be turned off,
and it boasts 99% coverage of both the DCI-P3
and Adobe RGB color spaces.
Unlike some of the larger OLED displays out there,
it's only 31 and a half inches.
We'll get back to that missing half inch later.
And it runs at a refresh rate of 60 hertz,
which isn't the best,
but remember it's not for consuming content,
it's for creating it.
But I still wanna game on what is on paper
the best display I've ever looked at.
This is my first time seeing this game
on such a wide gamut monitor,
but I don't notice a difference.
And I shouldn't because if we're in SDR,
we're only making use of sRGB anyway.
Many consumer, in fact, most consumer monitors these days
are able to achieve pretty close to 100% coverage of sRGB.
Let's switch over to HDR though.
Probably wanna crank our (indistinct)
this is an OLED monitor, and.
Here it is.
We can verify if we're in the right color space.
Yep, so we're in BT.2100 HDR.
And theoretically, this is the widest color gamut
I've ever seen on a monitor.
Honestly, speaking,
this is such a kind of muted scene
that I kind of wanna try a different part of the game.
Oh wow.
This looks pretty.
Man, this is still a good looking game
even after it's been a few years now.
With that said, it's gorgeous.
But to my eye, it's not, you know,
can we try this side-by-side with like
just a consumer grade IPS panel that's also been calibrated.
- [Plouffe] For sure. - You thought of that?
- [Plouffe] Yeah, we've got one.
- We have one, of course we do.
Now to be clear,
this is still a monitor that costs $2,000 brand new, but.
I mean, I can't.
Boy.
Okay.
Okay, this is higher contrast for sure.
Even though the one on the right
is rated for a peak brightness of a thousand nits.
I'm definitely retaining more detail
on the dark portions of the scene.
And I'm gonna switch it again.
Now there's still lots of detail in the dark portions,
and this is very nice.
As a sanity check,
we restarted the game with the LG monitor
completely disconnected just in case there was some kind
of tone mapping problem switching from one to the next, and.
Yeah, it still looks great.
But even if we can't tell the difference
between this and like a $2,000 monitor,
why don't we go full consumer like $600 monitor,
like high-end consumer.
Maybe then we will see it.
One thing to consider before we do this,
is that monitors at this price point,
don't generally support HDR,
or at least don't really support it properly.
So I'm just gonna double-check that both of our displays
are in sRGB because that's the color space
you'd be in for SDR.
And I'm gonna use the little nipple navigation
that personally, I am quite partial to.
Like this convenient,
quick color space changer in the space.
You need to make sure that you're in sRGB mode as well.
Okay. That is a difference.
Honestly speaking,
I don't know that I like the OLED picture better.
- [Brandon] I was about to say the same thing.
- Plouffe is this what's supposed to happen?
- [Plouffe] You're supposed to get
more correct colors, right?
People tend to like brighter images
and more saturated images.
- [Brandon] And I would agree that like the left
probably looks closer to like, if this was real life,
that's what I would probably look like.
- [Plouffe] A lot of people actually prefer oversaturation.
- Will the game output Adobe RGB?
Do any games support Adobe RGB?
- [Plouffe] I don't think so. No.
It'll try its best to sort of tone map to it.
It's not gonna be perfect.
Most games are still made with sRGB in mind
because people don't have expensive monitors or TVs.
- Okay.
Well, one of the problems is that we've got the brightness
way down on this.
And to the human eye,
higher brightness does tend to look better
at least to a point.
So let's go ahead and fix that up.
Get them kind of similar,
actually that looks, yeah, it looks very close.
It's an OLED already.
The last thing you wanna do is set it to 25% brightness.
Okay.
This looks a lot closer.
Now we don't have quite the same kind of green cast.
And I would say that it's pretty clear
that this is the better looking in sRGB mode.
The difference is really
not as much as you might want though,
obviously this moss or whatever this is,
is more vibrant in spite of the fact
that they're both in the same color space.
And if we wanted to try out a different color space
like Adobe RGB, we'd probably see more pop to it.
Yes we do.
But that's just telling mapping.
That's not 'cause the content is actually supposed
to look like that.
With this one,
you can obviously tune your saturation or whatever,
but you can't actually change the color space
that it is representing.
It's just sRGB, just adjusted to look worse.
As hard as it is to tell the difference,
it's absolutely beautiful.
Probably the best looking monitor I've ever seen.
And if it wasn't stuck at 60 hertz,
I mean, I can see how high-end gamers would be tempted.
Before you ask by the way, we did try overclocking it,
no dice, not even 61 hertz.
After speaking with the senior engineer at LG,
we learned that a higher refresh rate panel
is on the horizon
and they're working on variable refresh rate support.
But you've got to understand that the method they use
to drive a panel with individual self illuminated pixels,
it's not the same as LGs other gaming displays
and getting this stuff tuned takes time.
Color accuracy was the highest priority
and everything else went by the wayside.
And if Disney Pixar's take is anything to go by,
it looks like LG nailed it.
They have actually endorsed this display
which is very uncommon for Disney,
who tries to stay neutral when it comes
to just about everything.
It's not as good as a $30,000 mastery monitor,
particularly when it comes to brightness,
which we'll talk more about later.
But it is good enough to get most of the way there.
So the idea is to have most of the team
using the 32EP950 for their day-to-day work,
then have one or maybe two people
with expensive mastery monitors to double-check it
and make corrections as they see fit.
And this is actually the setup that they used
for the film "Luca".
It's also a much more portable solution to work from home
compared to such professional beasts,
which has become more and more common
in the last couple of years.
It is very light,
at just 5.3 kilograms or just under 12 pounds.
And it is really thin
compared to some of the other professional displays
that we've looked at in the past.
By comparison, the 1600 nit,
Asus PA32UCG takes up a ton of desk space
and it requires a more robust arm
if you wanna clamp it to your desk.
The 32EP950 is equipped
with two display port 1.4 connections, HDMI 2.0,
which I guess makes sense
since it can't do 4K 120 hertz anyway,
a USB hub to easily connect peripherals with further cables,
USB-C with 90 watts of power delivery.
If you want it to connect
and charge your laptop with a single cable.
And of course, a good old fashioned headphone jack.
As for the downsides, I'd say glare is an issue
even with the anti-glare coating that they put on.
So you'll wanna make sure that your home office
has some blinds for those sunny days.
And as great as OLED looks,
there's always gonna be a bit of fear regarding burn-in,
especially when you consider that many professional tools
have static on-screen elements
that will be there for probably
90% of the displays lifetime.
Okay.
Well, that's where that half inch of screen space
that's missing comes in.
Check this out.
This second inner bezel here
that goes all the way around the screen,
it's kind of distracting once you notice it.
But it does serve a purpose.
It actually gives the screen 50 pixels on all sides
to shift the image around helping to reduce
the chance of burn-in.
Take this with a grain of salt,
but anecdotally our engineering contact of LG
hasn't seen any of these displays suffering from burn-in.
And he told us that as long as you're not blasting
a single spot of light,
or a super bright light for very extended periods of time,
it should be fine for years to come.
Now, when testing ours with Calman's color checker software,
we got an average delta E out of the box of 1.5 in sRGB,
and Adobe RGB mode.
That's not perfect.
But it's pretty darn good out of the box.
And anyone willing to shell out for this kind of display
is gonna wanna calibrate it themselves
before they get to work anyway.
It unfortunately doesn't come with a colorimeter
like some other expensive displays.
So you'll just have to consider that it's gonna cost you
another two or $300 on top of the price tag.
Though you'll only need one colorimeter
if you're planning on buying a handful
of these for your studio.
Speaking of the price are two other issues with this,
are price and HDR support.
The 32EP950 is VESA certified, HDR true black 400.
What that means is that while it gets plenty dark,
because you can turn the pixels off,
it suffers from the same pitfalls as other OLEDS,
meaning that it can't get that bright.
And it's only really suitable
for an optimal HDR viewing experience
in a fairly light controlled environment.
It just can't achieve the same kind
of crazy high nits peak brightness
that we've seen on recent monitors, like the Odyssey Neo G9
and the ProArt PA32UCG from Asus.
With that being said,
there's only one higher rating currently
for true black HDR, 500.
So you're probably not missing out on much.
And that's for the price.
There's two ways of looking at that.
Now on the one hand, $4,000 is a crap ton of money,
and I wish it was cheaper.
Because I mean,
who wouldn't want just perfectly calibrated colors
all the time on everything.
But on the other hand,
at a thousand dollars, less than a top tier ProArt,
it's a bargain if you were shopping in that price range,
and you can even save a G by dropping down
to the smaller 27 inch version.
And for the Apple crowd,
the direct comparison would be something
like the Apple Pro display XDR,
which costs a thousand dollars more,
and doesn't come in a smaller, cheaper alternative model.
It also doesn't have 99% coverage of Adobe RGB.
But what it does have is the ability to work
seamlessly with Mac iOS.
By contrast, the 32EP950 works with Apple products,
but getting it to look just right,
involves changing ICC profiles and an EDID override.
The engineer we talked to actually wrote a 16 page document
with instructions on getting it to work.
So if you do go the Apple route,
you won't get quite the same, it just works experience.
But the good news is you can pay yourself handsomely
to fiddle around with the money
that you save on monitor stands.
And this portion of the video is sponsored by Adobe.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the cloud-based service
that gives you everything you need to create,
edit, organize store, and share photos across any device.
We use Lightroom to edit all of our photos on lttstore.com,
to make sure that our match and our models look their best.
Lightroom offers easy to use editing tools
from presets to detailed adjustments
to make your photos stand out.
And you can start your project on mobile, web or desktop
and have your edits automatically applied
no matter where you are.
Their new super resolution feature
uses artificial intelligence to increase the resolution
of your photos with astonishingly accurate results.
And you don't have to take my word for it.
Try out Adobe Photoshop Lightroom today
at the link down below.
Thanks again to Adobe for sponsoring
this portion of the video.
Thanks for watching guys.
If you liked this video,
make sure to check out our review
of the God king of monitors, the PA32UCG.
It's everything that's great about this,
except it also does 120 hertz
for that extra thousand dollars.
Although it's full of very local Deming's.
So you get a little bit of halos.
Okay, there's no perfect monitor yet.