Over the past month I've been looking to get a new monitor for use as a secondary display and for console gaming. Been using an LG 27GL850-B 144hz 1440P monitor as my primary display since last year and it's absolutely fantastic. So I decided to take advantage of Costco and Amazon's generous return policies and MONITOR MANIA HAS BEEN RUNNING WILD, BROTHER.
Tried:
-ACER VG280K: This was Digital Foundry's pick for best 4K monitor for console gaming. It's 60hz, but I was fine with that. It just didn't look or perform as well as the 27GL850-B and with consoles hooked up, I saw no difference between this and 1440P. 4K seems kind of wasted on monitors under 32".
-Razer Raptor: Despite having nearly the same specs as my 27GL850-B, this monitor costs almost $300 more with current prices. It's a 27" 1440P monitor that costs a whopping $700+. This is kind of like the "luxury car" of monitors- the build quality is insane and except for the bezels, the monitor is almost entirely made of metal (with a felt material on the back). The stand is amazing and made to easily hide all cables, which are all flat with right-angle ends. There is an issue with getting the cables slotted in and people have reported damaging them when doing this or removing them. I was really impressed with this monitor except for one problem- it fried my eyeballs just looking at it! Could not find anything in the settings to stop it from giving me severe eye strain when using it normally. Games really did look great though.
-LG 27GL850-B: Yup, a second one! This monitor is great for console games because it can take a 4K signal and downscale to 1440P. So no issues with a PS4 Pro or PS5, and it can apparently even do 120 fps on PS5, albeit at 1080P only as it's only got HDMI 2.0 ports. Would highly recommend this if you're looking for a 27" panel. Pretty much zero complaints.
-Samsung Odyssey G7 (32" version): This is a VA panel. I generally go for IPS for the better viewing angles, less ghosting/blur, and colors, but this monitor is the current number one pick for best gaming monitor on a number of sites including RTINGS, so wanted to check out it. Samsung is using some kind of new tech for this and while there's noticeable color distortion when looking at it from an angle, the monitor feels very IPS-like to me and I saw no noticeable ghosting. This monitor also has an insane 1000R curve which may be off-putting. When playing games, I didn't mind it at all and it helped make things more immersive, but it did look a bit weird at times when using the web. There's a very large number of people out there citing all kinds of QA issues with this monitor and reporting flickering issues, which are supposed to have been resolved from a firmware update. FWIW, mine had none of these issues and was on a higher firmware than I saw people mention, but even then, I did notice the screen change brightness on its own occasionally (with all auto settings off) and it takes a noticeably longer time than any other monitor I've tried to wake up. 32" also seems to be a bit too large for 1440P. Games are not a problem here, but outside of that, text is a but fuzzier and I just prefer the sharper look of a 27" 1440P panel. It really is the sweet spot for that resolution.
Was going to likely keep the extra LG in the end, but then I got a crazy bonus at work for everything that happened last year, so decided to splurge and ordered an LG CX 48" TV instead. I'm not going to even attempt to use this as a monitor proper, (it's way, way too big for that. Have seen videos of people trying and I just can't see that being comfortable, plus there's a risk of burn-in) but it should work out great for console gaming and 4K 120hz gaming from my PC with 3080 via HDMI 2.1.
