Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsterrible pixel bleed and ghosting, not acceptable for gaming or desktop
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2020
Originally I gave this 3 stars; but, now that I've got an actually good monitor, I had to revise that down to just 1. There's absolutely no reason to buy this monitor for desktop, gaming, or video. If you're made of money enough to buy this and a 3080 to drive 4k 120hz, then please spend the extra $500 to get the LG CX, or some other OLED / QLED. The LG CX I got instead has 0 pixel bleedover, 0 ghosting, and still plenty HDR brightness. I'm able to use it for desktop text with perfect clarity.
Pros - The darkening near the edge of the screen is minimal / up to my standards. Also, angled viewing and viewing of the corners of the screen didn't produce color skew that was beyond my tastes.
Cons - This is a desktop / gaming monitor (120hz, G-Sync); but, this panel is completely unsuited to it. It has rather bad bleeding from one pixel to its neighbors. It makes reading smaller text on the desktop so hard, you'll feel like you're going blind. Why pay the money for 4k rendering and monitor when the blur is so bad that it might as well be 1440p?! This statement applies equally to desktop, gaming, and movies.
There's also terrible terrible ghosting, i.e. as images move across the screen, they leave afterimages for far longer than they should. A 3-pixel wide line becomes 15-pixels wide once it's moving, then snaps back to 3 pixels once it stops: incredibly distracting! You're effectively at 720p every time the scene moves. Turning on backlight flicker is actually worse because you get flickering, less brightness, and no G-Sync while still ending up with 3 or 4 more distinct overlaid afterimages instead of a smear.
Finally, and this one's a bit more technical, there's a moderate degree of vertical "screen door" artifacting that only appears when objects are in motion. This is caused by the red LCD elements of each pixel not having enough power to rapidly change colors, resulting in the red elements all going dim whenever the image is moving. So, each time the scene moves, it looks like someone threw a screen door in front of the image; it's all broken up with vertical lines, like a banded print-out from an old printer. Once the scene stops moving, all smoothed out again. Besides the jarring effect and objective loss of fidelity, it makes the image suddenly feel like a 2d cardboard cutout each time the scene moves.
