LG continues to provide impressive monitors for the gaming market. With the LG 27GP850, they company hasn't simply re-released a previous product with a few enhancements but LG has clearly assessed the market, noted that some newer IPS monitors were offering better performance, and stepped up their game with their 2021 27-inch 1440p monitor. This has led to several improvements over the prior model.

The basic fundamentals are the same: this is a 27-inch 2560x1440 display using LG Nano IPS technology. Same 98% DCI-P3 gamut coverage, same adaptive sync support with G-Sync and AMD FreeSync. But there are three major additions that make this more than just a refresh. I also quite like how easy it is to access the 27GP850's ports on the rear, where you'll find a DisplayPort, two HDMI connectors and a couple of USB ports. This complicates wall mounting somewhat - this display does have a VESA mount - but I feel the ease of access is worth it. The overall rear design is nice, and I'm glad LG hasn't changed it substantially from previous monitors. monitors: Digital cinema 4K resolution provides crisp images with a significant number of pixels on screen. 4K resolution displays over four times the resolution of standard 1920 x1080 FHD, and over half a million more pixels than UHD resolution, which means you can view even the finest details clearly. Viewing angles are still excellent, so while the 27GP850 may have TN-like contrast, it does offer a much better viewing experience overall. Uniformity on my unit was good without being amazing, not too different from the 27GL850. There was a bit of IPS glow with my model, although not as much as with my 27GL850, and this does tend to vary from unit to unit so whatever I report here may not be what you experience yourself.

Jasnije, tečnije i brže

First up we have performance in the Off mode, which is without overdrive. As expected we get virtually no overshoot, and we can see that native panel performance is around the 7.8ms mark on average. This is actually a very good result all things considered, but does fall short of what is required for a true 180 Hz refresh rate, so it might be time to enable overdrive. The big story around LG's Nano IPS panels has always been the contrast ratio. Unfortunately, LG have not been able to shift the needle significantly with this new generation. Based on our analysis, the LG 32" 32GP850-B and LG 27" 27GP850-B monitors both have a 98% DCI-P3 color gamut, which we found was excellent for gaming. While improving motion clarity and input latency, LG have kept pretty much everything else the same. This means the same great wide gamut experience, same great viewing angles, same sort of factory calibration and unfortunately, the same contrast ratio, which remains a weak spot for LG's offering. We do get higher brightness and a refreshed design though. Discover the latest innovations in performance and technology with gaming, TV and computer monitors from LG, including 4K, ultra-wide, IPS and more. See how we’re making life good.

In this mode we really start to see the benefits of LG's Nano IPS technology and the additional tuning they've done with the new 27GP850. We get a response time average of 4.65ms which is fast, and that allows for 82% refresh rate compliance at 180Hz, impressive given our new and much stricter testing methods. Inverse ghosting has increased slightly but it's not noticeable in practice, and this leads to a great cumulative deviation result of 407. Color Gamut refers to the range of colors that a monitor can display. A wide color gamut means the monitor can display more colors, creating a more vibrant and lifelike image. To compare this result to other monitors we can convert this result into Rec. 2020 coverage, with this color space being massive and much larger than P3. Here we can see a good result for the 27GP850, with about 70% Rec. 2020 coverage being similar to many other displays that prioritize wide P3 color gamuts. Updated to Test Bench 1.2, resulting in changes to the results and scores with the Response Time and Input Lag. Added tests for Console Compatibility and macOS compatibility and made minor changes to other tests, which you can see in our Changelog. Power consumption has decreased slightly across the generations. The 27GP850 consumes about 16% less power at the same level of brightness after calibration than the 27GL850, a modest improvement to efficiency but not that different to some other 27-inch 1440p gaming monitors that I've benchmarked.Determining what is most important when choosing a monitor depends on which color space (CMYK, sRGB, DCI-P3, or Adobe RGB) you usually use. We recommend choosing a monitor with a wide range of colors. The higher the percentage, the better the experience. The DCI-P3 color space is the most popular and has the widest range of colors.

To be clear, it doesn't need that higher refresh rate to be better, even comparing 144Hz to 144Hz, the 27GP850 is better in terms of response performance, a product of tweaked and improved overdrive modes. Brightness is improved with the 27GP850 compared to the 27GL850, the new model does around 450 nits compared to 350 with the prior generation, so that's a solid improvement that will assist those in bright environments. Minimum brightness is outstanding, at below 30 nits, great for those that like a dim monitor for gaming at night. Response time is another important consideration when choosing a monitor, especially for fast-paced activities such as gaming, sports, and action movies. Ghosting, the blurring or trailing of fast-moving objects on the screen, can be distracting and negatively impact the viewing experience. In our years of gaming, we have tried and tested various monitors and encountered the annoyance of ghosting, which can negatively impact the overall viewing experience. Expand your point of view with LG monitors that adapt to the needs of business users, gamers, graphic artists and multimedia enthusiasts alike. Discover computer monitors with slim designs, striking color and life-like motion for an optimal viewing experience. Work more efficiently with LG's Office computer monitors that are ultra-clear and wide, offering true color contrast and detail at any angle.Typical gaming monitors have response times ranging from 1 to 6 milliseconds, which is considered fast enough for most gamers. However, based on our hands-on experience with various monitors, we prefer higher-end monitors with response times as low as 0.5 milliseconds. This lower response time provides even smoother and more responsive motion, ensuring an immersive gaming experience. At a fixed 120Hz, the 27GP850 is a very fast monitor and competes favorably with other displays. Like we've talked about before, at the same level of overshoot the 27GP850 is 18% faster than the AG273QXP which uses LG's previous Nano IPS design, and quite a bit faster than the 27GL850 although with more overshoot. Based on our analysis, the Gigabyte 27" M27Q X and LG 27" 27GP850-B monitors have a similar color gamut, both of which we found were excellent for gaming. IPS-skærme: IPS-computerskærme har skarpe farver, reducerer farvetab og hjælper med at holde farverne konsistente i stort set alle vinkler. LED-baggrundsbelysningen leverer dybe sorte nuancer, rige farver, en fantastisk kontrast og høj farve detalje. It's also a much more substantial update to the display than last year's refreshed 27GN850, with LG showing the clear goal of retaking the performance throne in this class of monitor.

Based on our analysis, the Gigabyte 27" M27Q X and LG 27" 27GP850-B monitors both have a resolution of 2560 x 1440, which we found was excellent for gaming. When using the Normal mode, at 180Hz performance does improve noticeably compared to overdrive disabled, and LG has achieved this without increasing overshoot. A 6.5ms grey to grey average response time is in line with several other IPS monitors, but we can do better than this. Let's increase the overdrive up to Fast. LG needed this because in the past year or so we've seen other fast IPS panels hit the market, like the AU Optronics panel seen in MSI's MAG274QRF-QD, offering a step above the older 27GL850 in performance.

Sammenlign

The resolution is another critical aspect of a gaming monitor. The resolution is measured in pixels; the more pixels a monitor has, the sharper the image will be. A higher resolution results in a clearer and more detailed picture. In my opinion, the LG 27GP850 is the best in its class from the monitors I've tested, with the combination of great response times and a functional sRGB mode pushing it over the edge. It's generally worth the price premium and its overall balance of features with few weak areas makes it a monitor you won't be disappointed to have. When looking at cumulative deviation, we do see an improvement for the 27GP850, it now sits firmly among those new IPS panels we've just been talking about, although not generationally ahead. In comparison, last-gen versions like 27GL850, S2721DGF and AG273QXP all sit in the 580 to 540 range in this metric. So the 27GP850's result of 521 is in the range of 5 to 10 percent better, not a huge improvement but decent for what appears to just be overdrive tweaks, rather than an entire overhaul of LG's IPS technology - and it's doing this without variable overdrive. However the most recent wide gamut IPS displays like MSI's MAG274QRF-QD take things one step further, with in excess of 80% Rec. 2020 coverage. This allows the MSI monitor to also support full Adobe RGB coverage, which the 27GP850 does not. Having Adobe RGB coverage in addition to P3 may be useful for some creative workloads, so if that's important to you then other panels will be better than the 27GP850. Despite this, LG are still providing quite a wide gamut. However I also think that's being a bit unfair to LG. Usually when I talk about displays not delivering a single overdrive mode experience, it's because each mode is unusable at a certain point in the refresh range. That could mean decent performance at 144Hz but severe inverse ghosting at 60Hz. That's not really the case with the 27GP850, and the differences between the Normal and Fast modes are small overall. I actually found it quite hard to decide which mode is better for adaptive sync gaming, ultimately I settled on the Fast mode but overall it's a case where buyers can choose to either prioritize low overshoot with the Normal mode, or speed with the Fast mode, and get a pretty good experience across the board.