It’s been two months since LG Canada invited me to experience pure self-loathing.
I’m mostly over it… mostly.
Getting to test the same monitor in my setting has helped. I am now saving up for my own to replace my four-year-old underwhelming UHD monitor.
LG sent me the 45-inch UltraGear OLED [45GR95QE-B] to play with for two weeks as a consolation prize. And I’m now convinced OLED is the way.
Here’s what I think.
“Life’s Good” at detecting what you’re doing
The UltraGear OLED is one of the most straightforward monitors I’ve used for Quality of Life and work/play.
I’ve tried very carefully to create a battle station ready to tackle my 9-5 and gamming sessions.
On my current monitor, I run a work laptop and a gaming desktop through DisplayPort, While my play setup includes a Sony PS5 and Nintendo Switch run through HDMI.
The current monitor I’m using doesn’t offer automatic input switching, which I know is pretty standard now, but one of those things you wonder why you don’t have after two weeks of having it.
For those times you want to control, LG has outfitted the UltraGear OLED with a handheld remote that controls onboard RGB lighting, inputs, and interior DTX speaker settings.
Tall, tall visions
The next thing I find to be very impressive is the UltraGear OLED display factor.
The 45-inch model offers a lower but deeper 800R curve that prioritizes height over width.
That angle offers a smaller form factor than a UHD monitor like my current one. Still, I’ve enjoyed better overall immersion with less need to head turns or forcing my eyes to re-focus.
The immersion is fast and beautiful with a 21:9 aspect, 240Hz refresh rate, 0.03ms response time, and DCI-P3 colour space.
Lag? I hardly know of it.
As part of my Raptors Uprising X LG Canada preview, I took to the court in NBA 2K23, which I felt wasn’t a suitable game to experiment with, so I was glad to have the opportunity to try my collection of games.
I started with The Division 2: Warlords of New York because even though it’s a three-year-old game, it still punches its weight against modern games… and I’d just gotten back from NYC, so this was a form of feeling like I was back on vacation.
I was gob-smacked by how in line the actions were with my inputs. This monitor will do well with FPS players.
The tall 21:9 aspect ratio fit a mammoth amount of Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers, which was impressive.
While the monitor does feature HDR10 brightness, I still found darker areas of the game needed some fiddling with, but that’s something I’ve come to expect as a requirement for OLED’s often darker box brightness settings.
I next moved on to Madden 23 to see how another sports game would fare.
In the long-running football title, I found that background details were rough regarding resolution. However, the lack of leg presence has made me a better QB.
Finally, I turned the Switch on to play The Legend Of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Quite expectedly, this was the roughest experience as this is very much not a game meant to be played in 21:9. However, being able to play The Legend Of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in a way that’s as close to handheld mode OLED as possible is the way!
Verdict
OLED gaming is the way if it hasn’t sunken in yet. And LG’s UltraGear OLED is a great way to do so. It will be hard to return this monitor to LG Canada and return to UHD for a while. I still find the OLED a little darker, and the LG UltraGear has a wonky resolution that sometimes requires some fiddling.
But the Quality of Life aspects and attention to detail here make it easy to find your way.
[LG provided a retail unit for review purposes.]
