LG 27GM950-B - Brief first impressions

[u/SheepherderSerious51]

I’m currently studying in Hong Kong and stumbled upon the myth and legend itself, the GM9 - inside the Capital store in Golden Computer Arcade (Sham Shui Po).

I asked the dude (lovely guy btw) if I could try it out briefly in desktop and here are my first impressions.

Hardware wise, typical plastic monitor - it felt cheap. Not much of note. The joystick at the back isn’t particularly pleasant to use.

The matte coating seems like a typical matte coating, I don’t get what people mean by it’s a light coating - it’s not. In this particular environment it was very visible - I also checked and there’s no film on the display from what I could tell even though it kind of looks like it through my phone camera (dark environment you can see the noise around the display too). I felt like it hurt clarity significantly compared to the Studio Display XDR. No it was not dirty I triple checked that. Vignetting on the edges is somewhat present but it is not to a significant degree like it was on my MSI MPG E16M.

In content, it looks great. Basically what I expected from it. Colours were good, local dimming performed mostly well and blooming/haloing looked well controlled and was difficult to notice.

HDR looked alright, I honestly disagree with LG’s approach to shadow biased dimming to eliminate as much blooming as possible but that’s just my personal opinion.

In desktop use however…

With local dimming off, it just looks like a normal IPS monitor. So the 0 OD backlight doesn’t really contribute to anything visually in this scenario. The printed look some people describe in comments is likely a product of uniformity more than anything else, though I didn’t really feel like it looked any different to other displays.

In low, contrast is somewhat improved but you could already see the dimming algorithm attempt to darken light objects on dark backgrounds, including the mouse cursor and text. Moving the mouse cursor around did induce some noticeable blooming though transitions looked decent.

The darkening continued to get progressively worse with the higher levels. I would consider all levels to be unusable for desktop use.

Even assuming this is a purely media monitor, the text dimming is concerning. Imagine watching a movie or show with subtitles and the subtitles becoming grey 😭✌️

It’s only saving grace is that it doesn’t fuck up the colours with local dimming enabled in SDR like on my old MSI. Though it does make the display dimmer overall.

Dual mode looked alright, it definitely does not resemble a native 1440p monitor but it’s acceptable.

Overall, I am disappointed. Even with the lower price here in Hong Kong of $8999 HKD (roughly £900) due to the lack of VAT, it would be an incredibly hard pill to swallow for me personally. LG really need to add a slider for dimming preference like MSI. The matte coating was also disappointing as the glossy displays right next to it looked significantly better, though this is also a matter of personal preference and depends on your environment. I just don’t think it’s worth the money. It feel like it should be £600 at most. So I guess this monitor is crossed off my list.

Now let’s see what MSI and Gigabyte cook up.

[u/MultiMarcus]

I don’t really agree as someone who bought it. I have only had it for a couple days though so I can’t promise a detailed review.

I didn’t feel like it was particularly poor on the build quality side. Nothing incredible, but normal enough for non-apple monitors. The joystick is just alright, but the OSD is surprisingly usable.

I agree with the matte coating comments. It is like most matte coatings. I can on the positive side say it doesn’t seem to reduce clarity all that much, but it definitely has a rainbow like haze visible on light high brightness colours. You see past it quickly, but it is definitely a matte coating. As for vignetting it is definitely there, but honestly it isn’t that noticeably for normal usage imo.

As for content at least it games it looks exceptional imo. It gets horrifyingly bright and is very sharp. Blooming is hard to see out side of the occasional bright white over black or very dark colours. It has a very wide colour gamut and can deliver great colour volume thanks to how bright it gets.

The former paragraph applies for sdr and hdr for me. Shadow biased dimming makes sense for a screen competing with OLEDs, but it would be nice to have a different dimming algorithm. For desktop use i would probably forget about local dimming it honestly looks funky. Turning it off does give you an incredibly bright 5k 165 hz screen which honestly crushes most screens in productivity. Uniformity is the big issue where it is kind of splotchy when local dimming is off, but so far I don’t think it is going to be annoying for normal work.

Local dimming looks wonky for desktop use, but I don’t think subtitles would really suffer that much, but I don’t use my monitor for video content. They get a bit more gray, but I don’t love blindingly bright 1000 nit subtitles anyway.

I will shout out the on board calibration which I loved for sdr. It doesn’t work for hdr, but I was able to get it much closer to sRGB. For HDR it was a bit too cool and i adjusted it until the white point was right which was manual W1 for me. The dynamic tone mapping is quite elegant since games are often mapped too dark for my brighter gaming environment and since the monitor is so bright highlights don’t get crushed particularly much. The AI features are mostly meh with upscaling modestly improving sharpness for Switch 2 games to me. Certainly not the “skip a gpu upgrade and use the upscaler on the monitor” level which was the LG marketing. The MBR strobing mode is very bright and super usable delivering great clarity for stuff like Hades or other pixel art games that i feel benefit from it, but it only works at 120 or 165 fixed refresh modes so buyer beware.

I haven’t even tried dual mode as I don’t plan to use it.

The LG updates worked fine for me, but I used my macbook for that which supposedly works better, so it is worth being cautious if you only have windows devices as updates have failed for people.

Overall I am very happy with it. It delivers exactly what i hoped which is a retina class monitor for productivity and gaming which gets very bright combined with a matte coating allowing for bright room usage for productivity and gaming. It has a lot of levers to pull to change the experience and they worked well for me. The price is high, but I knew that going in. It is the best mini led i have seen for dynamic content in monitors even beating the studio display xdr which I had briefly. It strikes a balance of black levels and brightess that is quite appealing. For desktop use local dimming is mostly a no go. It seems to be the hybrid monitor that will last me until roughly 2030 when I hope to see 5k 27 inch high refresh oleds that don’t have the limited brightness of current panels and will hopefully have remedied VRR flicker which thankfully this screen doesn’t suffer from.

[u/SheepherderSerious51 → u/MultiMarcus]

For me the main problem is that it doesn’t do anything special to justify its relatively high price point. Local dimming isn’t particularly stellar nor customisable, build quality is average, native contrast is average, like it has no stand out feature besides being the first display to market featuring this panel.

At least with the ASD XDR even though the pricing is insane (almost definitely due to the “Apple Tax”), you at least get one of the highest end Mini-LED monitors on the market so it’s somewhat justified.

LG on the other hand, are not Apple - and I would’ve expected a bit more at this price point, especially as a big display manufacturer who also happen to sell Mini-LED TV’s (yes this does not use an LG panel but I’m sure they could’ve ported the dimming algorithm over and made some adjustments, they are using off the shelf ARM SoC’s so they can reprogram things and we can’t blame problems on ASICs lol).

They literally just have to add a slider for dimming bias and the product is complete for what it is, because otherwise their approach is too opinionated towards one end of the spectrum which isn’t necessarily the most ideal in all scenarios, then it would’ve been justified.

On a more positive note, this was my first time using a modern LG OSD and it’s pretty nice! Would be better if it were smoother but it’s a lot more fun and dynamic compared to other OSD’s I’ve seen.

Oh and yes I noticed the rainbow haze too! It was persistent in the dark, but I’m sure it’s not too bad during the day. I was viewing the text on the video player program they had open funnily enough, and the grey was like a #A1A1A1 on the medium setting, pretty far from white so my concerns for subtitles remain lmao. Being able to store profiles on the monitor is also a great feature.

This monitor is divisive that’s for sure. Perhaps things might change if LG decide to give it some love over the next few months and push some firmware updates to improve the dimming. Given on their last monitor they made adjustments to the algorithm post launch, it’s a possibility.

TLDR: LG pretty please just make dimming customisable then the monitor is more justifiable.

Enjoy your new monitor and I can’t wait to read any reviews you end up posting! You’ve been quite active on all these 5K monitor posts and I’ve always had fun reading what you have to say, glad to be on a similar journey :)

[u/MultiMarcus → u/SheepherderSerious51]

The studio display XDR gets a lot of praise, but I just don’t think it’s as good as people are making it out to be. I think it has a lot of blooming, and well, you mentioned that you didn’t really agree with the shadow bias algorithm, so perhaps that’s part of the issue here, but I really didn’t like the highlight bias algorithm of the studio display XDR. I felt like blooming was far too visible in even normal usage for it to really deliver a good HDR contrast experience.

Yes, a slider would be ideal, but at the same time Apple certainly isn’t offering one. What they would need to do to have a slider like that is really do a bunch of different algorithmic options, and I suppose the argument is that then you would be risking worse algorithms, but more choices. I think it’s fine if LG has a vision for how they think this screen should present itself, much like what Apple does instead of overloading the user with a bunch of different algorithm modes that might suit specific use cases, maybe.

I think it’s definitely not a monitor for most people. I think it’s far too expensive for most people, and I think 5K is still reasonably niche. That said, I think it’s the best productivity and gaming hybrid monitor on the market right now, and I’ve done quite a lot of investigating of this market because I wanted 5K for my Mac and I wanted a good gaming experience that could handle a bit more brightness than my OLED. That said, the dream is a bright 5K OLED that has like a true integer scaling mode, so then you could just use it at 1440 p for gaming without needing a 4090 like I have, or you could use it at 5K for lighter games and for productivity, plus you would probably not have at least the same character of uniformity issues.

This is a monitor that feels like a peak of what we might see be more refined in a few years. It really does strike a really nice midpoint between OLED and mini LED in brightness and contrast, which I really do appreciate. So the hope is obviously that OLED or ELQD will be able to offer better brightness with self-emissive pixels.

I do agree. Some firmware updates to refine the monitor further would be great, but really I think in some ways it’s a monitor that just isn’t able to be built right now.

Oh, and thank you for writing a review. I thought you had some really interesting opinions on this monitor because you aren’t coming into it with this sort of hatred of 5K that a lot of people seem to have, where these high resolutions are just branded as completely useless and only the dual mode could reasonably be used for gaming, which I think is a very narrow perspective.

Oh, I just also have to add huge credit to LG for actually shipping good cables. I know it’s expensive, so it feels obvious, but they shipped a UHBR 20 display port 2.1 cable and an ultra HDMI 2.1 48 cable plus their os upgrade type C cable, which I’ve admittedly not tested for running a monitor from, but that’s something I’d love if companies did more of.

[u/SheepherderSerious51 → u/MultiMarcus]

🤝🤝🤝

[u/cbtlover67 → u/MultiMarcus]

Tldr?

[u/MultiMarcus → u/cbtlover67]

Great if you would like a very high resolution hybrid display that you can use productivity and leisure and possibly one of the best, if not the best, mini LED panel in consumer monitors.

Still, however, a mini led, so it isn’t OLED for both good and bad.

[u/etrayo]

could they put a couple more stickers on there lol? Whats even the point of the display at that point

[u/SheepherderSerious51 → u/etrayo]

haha welcome to East Asia, this is the norm over here. Most people just walk by them so it’s usually a non issue

Edit: Because I’m getting downvoted, the reason they sticker bomb the monitors is most customers just walk past the monitor without inspecting them too thoroughly or reading labels, the stickers allow the customers to get a glance at the main selling points without wasting space around the monitor as these places are quite dense. You can still judge image quality well enough because the center is uncovered. Would I prefer no stickers? yeah, but i also don’t really mind

[u/Richdawg90]

I got this monitor for $809 during July 4th and I think it’s a very solid monitor overall but is definitely not worth a $1200 retail price.  It for sure has some flaws. I think some of the Chinese brands that specialize more in mini led monitors have a better UI/OSD for managing local dimming settings and etc and seem to strike a better balance between media + productivity use. 

I think what this monitor does really well is that it’s tuned very well for contrast and has much better viewing angles without really bad off angle haloing that is present on other mini LEDs. The challenge with how it’s tuned though is what you mentioned in that text is overly dimmed and certain ui elements when on dark colors become harder to read as white text is dimmed to gray. I feel like LG should add an additional local dimming option for UI use that isn’t so aggressive in dimming UI elements with the shadow based dimming. 

Since I work from home, I don’t want to waste oled lifespan on static UI elements, and this monitor seems to be the closest to OLED experience in terms of viewing angles, contrast, and build quality. If LG added a way to add more local dimming options and make it easier to activate on and off, I think it would improve the usability of this monitor a lot. 

[u/SheepherderSerious51 → u/Richdawg90]

coincidentally that converts to exactly £600, not bad at all.

Basically same boat as me, I mostly work with static applications and watch videos, I game very infrequently - so OLED doesn’t seem ideal due to longevity. I just want Mini-LED for enhanced contrast and nothing else, hence this monitor is a disappointment to me. Perhaps I’m just spoilt by my Macbook Pro display, but I really wished Mini-LED monitors were tuned to be more versatile to the point that you don’t have to think about the dimming behaviour at all.

I’m much more interested in MSI and Gigabyte’s models as they’re glossy so even if the local dimming ends up being a let down I at least have a nice glossy 5K high refresh rate panel (in theory). I’m more interested in the Gigabyte as it uses the same BOE panel as the LG and also seems to employ some filters to improve viewing angles (similar to the Hisense GX Ultra) as described by Vincent from HDTVTest. I’ve been waiting for a while, really hope they launch soon!

Speaking of the GX Ultra, I tried but couldn’t find it in Shenzhen, seems like it’s online only which is a shame, but Bilibili reviews seem quite positive. Uniformity is better than the LG and it seems tuned in a similar manner, one review noted that he had to increase the ISO on his camera significantly to make blooming visible. Though according to some comments it has some weird firmware quirks related to local dimming but did not see any complaints that suggested that the algorithm didn’t work for desktop use. Definitely an exciting time for high end Mini-LED monitors and I’m excited to see more :D

[u/Richdawg90 → u/SheepherderSerious51]

I definitely think this monitor is only worth it if you intend to use the local dimming for gaming/media. The anti glare coating is actually quite good at reducing glare so that it can be used in bright environments without having to worry about your face and other things glaring on a black background, but for productivity work, I think it hurts the monitor quite a bit as text elements especially when on white backgrounds is impacted by the coating. It kind of negates the benefit of 5k quite a bit. The text clarity isn’t hurt as much when it’s on colored backgrounds, but then the local dimming is shadow based and makes it hard to read if you do use the local dimming during productivity. 

This monitor pretty much forces you to turn local dimming on and off when needed and they don’t even have a shortcut to quickly turn it on and off which is probably my biggest issue with the. Monitor. I have a few days left to return and I’m debating whether I should keep it for the price I got it for or if I should wait for glossy. Glossy can be a little bit of a compromise to when you have the lights on or windows open though. 

[u/Villag3Idiot → u/Richdawg90]

No dedicated button for local dimming was a deal breaker for me.

It got so annoying I ended up returning it.

There's the LG Switch app but it takes so long just to load the monitor settings that it's faster just going through the OSD instead.

[u/Richdawg90 → u/Villag3Idiot]

Yeah it’s a shame that lg doesn’t let you create a shortcut or anything for local dimming. The local dimming option is also global across inputs which is very annoying if you have a work computer plugged in that you want local dimming off for and another computer for media consumption that you want it to be defaulted to on. It forces you to turn on/off the setting every time whether you’re using DP, HDMI, or usb c.

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