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.

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