The one thing that any LG UltraGear 27GN950 review will agree on is that it’s a genuinely fabulous gaming panel. The LG UltraGear 27GN950 is a furiously faulty gaming panel.
Take your pick because it’s all right. And it’s summing up all that’s variously fantastic and yet also a little pessimistic about today’s gaming display industry.
Still, we’re not going to get ahead of ourselves—first, a few rates and feeds. The LG UltraGear 27GN950 is a recent entrant to the busy 27-inch, 4K, 144Hz market.
Priced at £950 in the UK and a more attractive $800 Stateside, the 27GN950 is something of a ‘tweener’ in this region regarding both costs and specs.
The most noticeable shortcoming, relative to an equivalent but far more critical displays, concerns the introduction of HDR.
27GN950 supports HDR, including local dimming, and comes complete with the VESA DisplayHDR 600 certification. However, there are only 16 edge-lit zones in the local dimming, which does not bode well for a real HDR experience.
Pixel’s answer is another troublesome area. LG proudly claims that the 27GN950 NanoIPS panel delivers 1ms of responses.
But this point comes with a variety of caveats about the particular GTG response profile in question, which occurs only while the display is running in the most extreme of its three-pixel overdrive modes.
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Lg Ultragear 27gn950 Review: Interesting Features & Display
The OSD and power of the 27GN950-B are operated by a tiny joystick located in the bottom centre of the screen.
Lg Ultragear 27gn950 Review – It would help if you pressed it on the sides to monitor the volume and fore/aft to change the brightness. Press it, and you’ll get a short menu with input selection, game mode, control, and complete menu.
Game Mode refers to the eight presets of the display image. Gamer 1 is the norm and correct enough to be used without calibration if the P3 gamma is your target.
SRGB is used but only marginally reduces the range of over 130 per cent coverage. If you want to add the HDR look to SDR content, HDR Effect will do this.
It retains highlight and shadow detail well, but its appearance is a matter of personal opinion. You also get two calibration modes that enable True Color Pro-tech from LG to be unlocked.
LG 27GN950-B calibration controls are included in the Gamer 1 preset. There are four gammas presets, three-colour times, plus custom mode, a Kelvin value selection process, and a six-colour hue and saturation menu.
Both improvements are accurate with sufficient resolution and excellent precision. Minor modifications can result in a very reliable display.
Since it has a backlight tip, the LG 27GN950-B features local dimming. It has a minor effect on SDR quality but a large one in HDR mode, providing deep contrast, true blacks, bright highlights, and, thus, some of the best HDR results that we’ve seen among mainstream monitors.
Lg Ultragear 27gn950 Review: A Final Word
Lg Ultragear 27gn950 Review – Any of the finer details and functionality added, including HDR and reaction, are not clear wins. Meanwhile, the lack of HDMI 2.1 and USB Type-C is a bit limited, particularly looking forward.
Although you do not want to plug in a console or push this display with a laptop today, improved support for these usage models may come in handy in the future. At this price point, they’re not unreasonably asking.
If it were up to us, we would be tempted to withdraw modest HDR funding and save a little money.
But then we might conclude that there are several new monitors with weak HDR implementations. As it is, this is a very good, though slightly flawed, gaming monitor that leaves us needing only a little more money.
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Lg Ultragear 27gn950 Review: is it worth buying?
All the Lg Ultragear 27gn950 review agree that it’s a very fine display for almost any application. It’s a perfect gaming display with an excellent reaction time and a very short input lag. It has big viewing angles, decent peak lighting, and good reflective handling, perfect for workplace use or watching videos with a few mates.