My opinion after 100h with the Gigabyte MO27Q28G
Two weeks ago, I pulled the trigger on the MO27Q28G after it was in sale for 480€ in germany. I already had a quite nice 4k 144Hz IPS monitor, so I had my doubts going for an OLED. Is going to 1440P a noticable downgrade? Is 280Hz worth it? What about the vertical banding and uniformity issues of tandem OLEDs I read so much about? I want to share my personal opinion after 100 hours and 20 pixel cleaning cycles.
First, my use cases for my monitor. I hate to admit it, but I consumed mostly videos. After a long day going to my PC and watching YouTube is what I mostly do. Because of the trash bit rate of YouTube (even Premium) and the miracle of Nvidias Super Resolution I hardly noticed a downgrade in respect to sharpness coming from 4k. Most content on YouTube is still 1080p so it mostly doesn't matter anyways. I had high hopes for watching 4k HDR movies from my Blu Ray collection. So I changed windows to HDR mode and started a movie. I hate do admit it, but I was quite underwhelmed by both overall brightness and highlight brightness. I was much more impressed by my phones (Motorola Edge 60 Pro) screen than the monitor. This was it?, I thought, but then I changed the monitors HDR mode to Peak 1500. And there it was. Nice bright highlights combined with the absolutely stunning contrast of an OLED. I never watched movies this close to life, so rich in colour and immersive. Everything appeared almost 3D because of those perfect blacks. Even normal Blu Rays and DVDs combined with Nvidias HDR video enhancement benefit massively by using HDR. I later set my prefered HDR mode to movie, because darker colours are a bit more balanced and dark scenes are not crushed as much.
My experience with HDR gaming was a bit mixed. When I got the monitor, I thought Ghostwire: Tokyo should look amazing. Yeah, the game does look good, but I imagined the speels would pop more and be brighter. I'm not sure, if it's the game or me mangling the settings. I also tried The Witcher 3, and I definitely noticed increases brightness of some objects, but the contrast and colour volume was more impressive. I know, these are old games and I'm really looking foreword when the Cyberpunk DLC is in sale, then I'll definitely try that game. The drop in sharpness compared to 4k is noticable on small icons and small text, but no game breaker. The increase in performance though is crazy! Last year I upgraded to a 5070 and it ran games with DLSS and mostly high settings with 100 - 120 fps which is fine, but nothing compared to 280fps in Rainbow 6. Holy was that an experience. I don't know, whether it is the 280Hz or the increased pixel response times, but man is it nice to feel like the game is running in slow motion, so clear is everything. Unfortunately, I'm not a competitive player, but if I was, my monitor wouldn't hold me back.
I was really scared going for a tandem OLED, because of the many reddit posts I saw with terrible vertical banding and grey uniformity. I guess I'm lucky? Or maybe reddit is a negative echo camber? To be fair, if I want to, I can see it. Looking at this very tab and if I move my head a bit closer to the screen, some banding on the mostly grey background is visible. This did not change after using the screen, see my pictures. But it is really only visible in artificial tests. When gaming or consuming videos, I see nothing. Sometimes I can see it scrolling through YT's comment section or Discord, but I mostly use it on my second screen. Compared to my IPS and OLED laptop, the grey uniformity isn't perfect. It kind of looks like faint noise. But again, only on uniform grey backgrounds. When coding, I still have a grey background and there it is really hard to see. I'm more surprised, that the text is as clear as it is. I use 125% text scaling and I don't see any text fringing.
Other notes: I saw somewhere a thread, that described a bug, that the automatic pixel cleaning doesn't correctly activates. The monitor also doesn't remind the user when its time to do it, so I have to manually remind myself, and that explains that I only have 20 cycles with 100hrs usage. I liked the all metal stand, but I wish it could go a little higher. Also the cable management solution is only a terrible plastic clip. But what annoys me the most is the super short cable from the huge power supply to the monitor. My old monitor also had an external power brick, but at least the cable was long enough from the ground to a monitor arm. Gigabyte claims, the monitor supports CEC, but when I connected it to my speakers it did not turn on or off or send sound through the HDMI port.
Thanks for reading! I hope this comment convinces someone to give tandem OLEDS a chance. They deserve some love in this sub.