When gaming competitively, your gear should never limit your performance, and should instead work to your advantage, ensuring you can make the most of your abilities. This is especially relevant for monitors, as they are your main point of contact with each game’s environment.
For this reason, gaming monitor manufacturers are always seeking to achieve the lowest lag possible, developing monitors that can display the image being rendered by the source device as quickly as possible. This can be achieved in many ways, so it’s first important to understand the different components in the video chain that can delay the signal from being displayed.
What Causes Input Lag
Between the moment a frame is rendered by your source device and is displayed on your monitor, there are a few factors that can delay the signal. First, your monitor needs to receive the frame from your computer, which is transferred through a digital interface like DisplayPort or HDMI, which have practically no latency.
Next, the monitor will process the image according to the adjustments made by the user, which can include color balancing, performance overlays, or resolution scaling.
Finally, the signal is sent to the screen, where the pixels will progressively update to display the full frame. While the pixels change color very quickly, the response time isn’t instant, potentially leading to motion blur where the image is retained longer than it should showing up as a “ghost” in the next frame.
OLED is Faster
The latest LCD panels tuned for gaming have been able to reduce the response time as low as 0.5ms, but this unfortunately comes at a significant loss of quality either from a lower resolution or reduced color accuracy from the panel technology in use. In a realistic scenario, with a 240Hz IPS monitor, the usual response time is close to 3ms. On the other hand, OLED panels have a virtually instant response time of 0.03ms, leading to an incredible improvement in motion blur and smearing.
This is already a worthwhile reason to choose OLED over LCD for your next gaming monitor as it will offer the lowest total latency available in the market, allowing you to react as quickly as possible to action in-game, but it’s far from its only advantage.
Image Quality Improvements
Since OLED displays can individually turn off each pixel (partially what allows the low response times), they can achieve a true black level on dark areas of the screen no matter how small they are.
While matte coatings do help reduce reflections, they do so by diffusing the light across the whole surface, leading to a washed-out image with little contrast. With OLED’s true black capabilities, a glossy coating will ensure you can enjoy your games with the incredible contrast and vibrant colors your monitor can display.
The Dough Spectrum OLED
The benefits of OLED are undeniable, and it’s quickly leaving LCD behind on gaming performance, so we’ve been hard at work on our latest product, a 1440p 240Hz W-OLED monitor. ES07E2D is the ideal monitor for gaming, with incredibly low response times, stunning image quality thanks to its unique glossy coating, and all the other signature Spectrum features in an understated design that won’t look out of place in your setup.
Just like our current models, the price of our new monitor will gradually increase as it nears shipment and a global retail release. Early supporters can benefit from our lean online-only cost structure with no middle-man markups. As we near the retail launch, the price will go up to reflect the extra costs charged by retailers.
We will start sending out invitations to our subscribers to lock in pre-order pricing soon. Deliveries will start in July 2023. Subscribe to our newsletter today for a chance to lock in the lowest price!