Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsa great monitor with a feature that's a little ahead of it's time
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2023
This XENION Flex has amazing image quality and some advanced features that will probably become standard options in the future, but for which you are now paying quite a premium. First the positives: OLED has no backlight, each pixel is literally on or off, so the contrast ratio is excellent. That and the pixel transition times are so fast because of the OLED technology that no LCD can even come close. The screen is also enormous, so playing games or watching movies, especially in HDR, looks incredible. HDR is made possible, btw, by the high light output, nearly 800-1000 nits, which is fantastic for an OLED but merely decent for an LCD. The monitor is also 120Hz with Nvidia GSYNC and AMD FreeSync, so if you have the card to drive it you can get very smooth gaming.
Now the negatives. Some people have dinged the monitor because, with it's very large size but only 3440x1440 resolution, the pixel density is lower than what a typical 4k monitor would have. But for me this is more of a bonus than a downside. The argument that the density is too low is mostly about text. With less pixels per inch being used to create text the monitor doesn't have the same level of crispness that a smaller 4k monitor would, but what usually goes unsaid about that is that higher density also makes the text on the screen smaller. Because of the large screen size and somewhat lower pixel density text on this screen is much more readable, particularly if you are middle aged or above. And while the text might be theoretically less crisp on this monitor, if there is any fuzziness to it I can't see it, so all in all I actually appreciate the larger, more readable text.
A downside that does bother me is the brightness. OLED screens get stressed when they push out a lot of light, so to compensate the monitor has some protections enabled by default. When you are on a screen, say a web page, for an extended period of time the monitor will begin dimming the screen to ease the stress on the organic pixels. Refreshing the page or switching quickly between pages brings back the light, but it can get kind of annoying if you are reading something and it feels like you are gradually losing the light, plus the transition back to bright can hurt your eyes a little. I think there is probably a way to adjust this, but the problem is that OLEDs are famously wanting in durability, so I worry that fiddling with this could shorten the lifespan of my very expensive monitor.
Related but less annoying are things you don't have to do but probably should do to protect the monitor, like switching off icon visibility on your desktop and setting the background to straight black to avoid the dreaded screen burn, which again OLEDs are particularly prone to. You should also probably set a screen saver that blanks the screen after 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity. Again, you don't have to and the screen does have a 3 year warranty, but if you want the most bang for your buck this is probably a smart move.
Finally, the major talking point about this monitor that, in my opinion, is neither good nor bad, which is the bendable screen aspect. You can grab the outside edges of the screen and push it flat or pull it into a sharper curve. Some people will never use it, but it does serve a purpose. For gaming, pulling the screen into a curve makes the games more immersive, but for productivity work I find flat is easier to work with. The neither good nor bad part of this is that while being able to adjust the curve is a very nice feature and one that I think will probably become standard a couple years from now when the technology is less novel, for now you are paying one heck of a premium for it. The monitor is easily 25%+ more expensive than comparable offerings where only the ability to define the screen curve separates the monitors. I made the plunge, but not everyone will see it as worth the extra price.
Bottom line, if you don't mind paying a little extra to be on the bleeding edge, this is an excellent gaming, entertainment, and productivity monitor whose technology still requires a little extra care be taken to preserve full functionality.
