- [Linus] A few months ago
Samsung Display gave us an early look at their unreleased
Quantum Dot OLED TVs
and gaming monitors.
And we made a video telling you guys how blown away we were
by the image quality.
Except there was one small problem:
that video was sponsored.
So many of you accused us of being overly enthusiastic.
Well, guess what?
This right here is the Alien ware AW3423DW.
It's a 175 Hertz. It's got HDR
and it's equipped with a brand new
Quantum Dot OLED panel from Samsung Display.
And because James was the one who did that last video
I get to experience this tech in the flesh
for my very first time,
right in front of all of you.
And today,
there's no Samsung Display sponsorship to be found,
because this video is sponsored by Bit defender.
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(upbeat music)
There's no time to waste, so I'm all set up
on this chair that we literally found in the alley.
I'm at the new house
so there's no furniture here, yet.
And we are gonna game on this bad boy.
What do we got for graphics horsepower here?
- [Plouffe] We got 3090.
- A 3090, perfect.
Oh, should we talk about specs at all?
- [Plouffe] Nah, nah, nah you just gotta game on it.
- All right. I'm gonna try it.
(dramatic music)
I've been so excited to try these
ever since James came back from the early sneak peak.
The first thing I'm gonna do is change it
from HDR 400 true black,
which is what you'd see a on a typical OLED,
to HDR peak 1000.
That's right.
Theoretically, it has all the advantages of OLED
which means perfect blacks,
but with a thousand peak brightness.
We're gonna set the game to 3440 X 1440,
which is the native resolution of this panel,
but while we're in the menu,
you guys probably notice something, G-SYNC is enabled
and this isn't just regular G-SYNC,
this is G-SYNC ultimate.
So, that means we can have HDR
and G-SYNC running at the same time.
All the bells and whistles.
Oh, I can already tell HDR is working even just in the menu.
- It looks so good, oh my God.
- Here we go, here we go.
This is not as glinted and HDR,
as I would've expected.
Yeah, just normally you'd see like really eye searing
like specular highlights on the car and stuff like that,
it's just not that.
Okay, this shaded house with the lit sky behind it
is like kind of a crazy amount
of dynamic range here.
Like my eyes need to adjust
to look from one part of the scene to the other.
That's insane, there's still a lot of detail in here.
Like when I look up into the sky
with the sun behind it I'm like, oo ooh,
and then I look over here, it's funny.
It really depends how the game is mastered in HDR.
It seems like in Forza,
they were really going for a more muted,
but realistic HDR experience.
It is crazy how photorealistic this game looks
on an accurate display.
This thing will do 99.3% coverage
of the DCI-P3 color space,
and out of the factory,
we measured just a Delta E of two
in creator mode using Cal men.
So that's accurate enough for pretty much professional work
on a gaming display.
Now we're in game mode right now is not creator mode
because we wanna run it in HDR 1000.
But I was surprised
at how not overdone Samsung made their game mode.
Usually Samsung is the king of just Ridiculous vibrancy.
This looks great.
(Sacrifice Halo theme song)
How sure are you that the game supports HDR, Microsoft hides
HDR under screen calibration.
Okay. We can decide how HDR we're going here.
- 100%
Well, yeah, I think so.
- Yeah, crank it!
- Yeah.
- Okay. This looks freaking awesome.
- Oh man.
Love it.
I mean, it won't make me good at video games
but boy does it ever look good?
- Wow. I do not see any discernible color shift.
- That is Insane.
It's more like a, like looking at a picture almost.
Like obviously it's self-emissive, right?
Like it's illuminated
but you could forget you're looking at a monitor.
Unreal. It just looks awesome.
Like what else is there to say effects
and explosions look awesome.
Of course we've seen super color accurate displays
in the past that are totally unsuitable for gaming
but that is not the case here.
One of the other big advantages
of Oled is lightning fast pixel response times.
And that's still true here.
Samsung claims 0.1 milliseconds, gray to gray.
And I can't see any discernible motion blur
even when whipping the camera around.
That's freaking awesome.
Also pixel response time is only part of the calculation.
You also need to factor in how much input leg there is
from the displays electronics.
And we managed about 16 milliseconds
from click to photon with our Nvidia Ldat.
Which is up there with the best gaming displays.
- It's so responsive.
It's just, what are the compromises?
What are the compromises?
- It does it all.
- Find me one.
- That was a lie.
- COST!
- Honestly, like the clarity feels almost
strobing clear to me.
Like as I'm panning around, there's just no blur.
Now we should talk
about Samsung's bar brightness claims for a little bit here.
We did manage to hit their claimed 1000 nits
of peak brightness in a 1% or 2% window
which doesn't sound like a lot, but in a scene like this
would you really have more than 1% or 2%
of the screen that would actually be at peak brightness.
You wouldn't even wanna look at something that's
at a thousand nits across the entire display.
So it does fall off.
You see about 800 nits peak brightness at 10%.
And then once you make your way, all the way to full screen
it sits in the neighborhood of 280 nits
which is a lot for this much of your field of view.
It's very respectable compared to other devices out there.
And when you factor in that it's got perfect blacks.
The perceived dynamic range is extremely high.
Man. Look at this suit, all glow and yellow and stuff.
Ah, Jake, are you ordering one right now?
- Brother, look. (Laughing)
- Here. Get your shield back.
Where's your shield?
Does it recharge?
Yeah, there we go. There we go.
Watch this.
Ah, looks so good.
- Oh, it's so crazy.
Okay. Sorry.
I'm supposed to try a different game now.
Ah this game looks so good.
Like Forza had that realism kind of, you know, HDR effect
but this is like, whoa
fantasy environment, HDR, you know, it's just different.
It hits different
(Resident evil)
- All right.
We're in a much darker scene now
but this is a really good opportunity to talk
about one of the big benefits of QD Oled.
Which is much better representations of red and yellow.
Which are traditionally really difficult to handle.
And you come, man, it's gonna be hard to capture this
on camera, through your monitor.
But I, I tell you guys, the gold doesn't look yellow.
Like gold tends to look on a normal display.
It looks, it looks gold.
It looks shiny.
That is, I, I don't think I've ever seen
anything quite like it.
- Right? Shoot.
- And I should shoot it. Apparently.
- That was so cool.
- The thing about HDR
is it's not about just more FPSs, right?
Which is what we think about
in terms of what makes something better for gaming.
It's about increasing the immersiveness
and when a game is mastered well in HDR
it's just so much more realistic looking.
This looks and feels like I'm standing in the room.
I have actually
I have a confession to make gamer confession.
I have never played an RE game.
- What?
- Disappointed!
- Like your eyes need to adjust to perceive the difference.
It doesn't let you jump up ladders.
This is one of those kinds of games.
Something to note though, is that our RTX 3090
is working pretty freaking hard to make this look this good.
We could even benefit from a 3090 TI upgrade.
Get subscribed by the way
because we do have a review of that coming.
Here we go. I missed one of them.
Shoot.
- Okay. Are we close?
- Yeah.
- Oh shoot that's not what I meant to do.
- Oh, that's really close. Isn't it?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah
- No stop.
- I can't get rid of the menu.
So we're in filmmaker mode on the LGTV.
Yeah you lose a ton of the detail here.
It's all there. To be clear LGOLEDS this is a C1,
great viewing angles compared
to anything that we had seen before, but this is next level.
It doesn't matter where you are in the room.
Man, When are the TVs with this coming?
I definitely wanna see a TV
with a proper filmmaker mode with this display tech.
I feel like it could be even better.
Okay. Until now we've talked
about some of the reasons the AW3423DW looks so good
but I'm sure you guys want more depth.
It starts with the QD OLED panel from Samsung display
which works very differently from a typical white OLED
or W OLED panel by starting with blue light instead of white
then they filter that blue light
with inkjet printed quantum dots.
Hence the QD in QD OLED.
We've got another video explaining this more
in depth that you can check out here
but basically by starting with a high frequency wave
like blue across the entire panel
and then stepping that light down into red green or anything
in between through quantum dots, you lose very little light
in contrast to the current W OLED method.
Which filters colors rather than converting them.
And because there's no white sub pixel,
colors don't get washed
out when you're trying to make them look brighter.
And because we're being more efficient and not losing light
tO color filters, we're also not driving the panel as hard.
So the Alien ware QU OLDED here does have a manual
and an automatic pixel or panel refresher option
but the tech has come so far
that we're just not anywhere near as afraid
of burning as we used to be.
On top of that, Dell is so confident in Samsung's panels
that they're offering a three year warranty.
That includes burning.
Now we're still waiting for some official statements
from Samsung about results from factory testing
but confidence is pretty high that you can finally leave
up your UI during a marathon gaming session and not worry
about it sticking around when it's time to watch a movie
as for the rest of the monitor, you can put it either
on the stand or on a standard base mount.
And it's got a two-one white
and black plastic case with RGB lighting on the back.
There's lots of IO, including this is really cool.
Two USB ports on the bottom
making them way easier to reach than most monitors.
And there's an navigation nipple down there
for the onscreen display, which has tons
of handy options and is really easy to use.
It's got decent cable management
through the stand and while the inner
and outer bezel leaves a little bit to be desired.
Honestly, I immediately stop noticing as soon
as there was content up on the screen
there's also an acceptable level
of pan swiveling tilt with the included stand meaning
that Alien ware might have just made almost
every other ultra wide 1440 P monitor irrelevant
especially given the price. It's $1299 us
which is a lot of money.
But right now, if you look
for similar specs with an IPS panel, rather than a QD OLED
you're not gonna find many at significantly cheaper prices.
This 34 inch ultra gear from LG, $1250.
There's a cheaper ultra gear, but it has way worse HDR.
Uses regular IPS instead of now IPS.
And it's only G-sync compatible
not G-sync ultimate and that one's still a thousand dollars.
So you have to ask yourself is QD OLED worth spending
an extra 300 bucks.
It's not gonna be in everyone's budget, but we think
that if you're already in that kind of price range
the answer is most definitely yes.
And we're gonna have this
and these other displays linked down below.
So you can make your own decision later.
Now, part of the reason the price is not
in the several thousand dollars category is
the ability to get so many panels
of this size from one sheet of mother glass.
That's the name for the giant slabs
of glass that TVs and monitors are cut from.
We don't know exactly what Samsung display is doing
but at 2.5 by 2.2 meters
you can fit 18 of this on a single sheet.
Instead of trying to cut a few out of the leftover glass
from larger displays, like 75 inch TVs.
Now Samsung is reporting some low yields
on this tech as low as 30%.
But since so many screens are being cut from a single sheet
one small defect doesn't necessarily mean
that one six of your entire sheet of is now garbage.
And as time goes on
and the yield rate increases a nice thing
about it being so low is that there's a lot
of room for improvement.
So the price should come down even further.
Speaking of great prices.
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So it seems like an easy answer.
If you're shopping for a display, good product, good price
all things considered.
So this is what you buy right?
Well, yes, but also no
this is the first QD OLED gaming monitor on the market.
And while it seems great
you're always taking a bit of a risk with new tech.
There's also no real competition yet.
And there are sure to be a plethora
of QD OLED options in the not so distant future.
We could see better prices or
I mean, who knows
maybe you just don't really like the design of the stand
or the housing that Alien ware has given us here.
So jumping in now honestly looks like a goodbye to me
but there are bound to be more options to choose from
if you have a bit of patience.
As for me, my C10 is two generations old at this point.
So, uh, woo.
This is looking like a pretty good upgrade.
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If you guys like this video
but you still aren't sure about QDOLED.
You can check out
the Samsung just made everything else obsolete video.
It was sponsored by Samsung
but the title really does say it all.
Guys. This is really cool.
Display tech, no Samsung money insight today.