LG 27GR93U-B Monitor Review

The LG 27GR93U-B has a rather simple design with a dark gray body. The back features a honeycomb pattern, and it has some RGB lighting that you can change with presets. Unfortunately, there's a silver reflective strip underneath the bottom bezel, which can be distracting if you have a bright light source in your room.

The build quality is good. There aren't any obvious quality control issues, but the bottom bezel isn't perfectly flush with the screen. That said, it isn't an issue unless you care about perfect aesthetics. The plastic materials are solid, and while the screen wobbles a bit on the stand, it stabilizes quickly.

The ergonomics are good, but without swivel adjustment, you can't easily turn it to show the screen to someone next to you. You can only rotate into portrait mode in a clockwise direction, which means the inputs are always on top. The stand also has a clip for cable management.

The stand features V-shaped feet, with enough space to put your peripherals between them. The stand supports the screen well, but there's still wobble.

There's a single joystick underneath the center of the screen to control the on-screen display.

• DisplayPort cable
• HDMI cable
• USB-B cable
• Power supply
• Mouse bungee clip (not pictured)
• User documentation

The LG 27GR93U-B has a mediocre contrast ratio. Blacks look gray next to bright highlights, and it doesn't have a local dimming feature to improve it.

This monitor doesn't have a local dimming feature. Although it has a Variable Backlight setting, it only boosts the contrast level in HDR and doesn't turn off any dimming zones. We still film these videos on the monitor so that you can compare the backlight performance with a monitor that has local dimming.

The SDR brightness is impressive. It easily gets bright enough to fight glare, and it maintains its brightness consistently across different content. That said, its minimum brightness is high, which is disappointing if you want to use it in a dark room and you're sensitive to bright lights. These results are from after calibration in the 'Gamer 1' Game Mode with the Brightness at its max.

The LG UltraGear 27GR93U-B has decent HDR brightness. While it gets bright, small highlights don't pop against the rest of the image because it lacks a local dimming feature. It struggles with EOTF tracking as dark scenes are overbrightened, and it has an early roll-off, so highlights don't get very bright. These results are in the 'Gamer 1' Game Mode with the Brightness at its max.

The horizontal viewing angle is good. It's a great choice if you need to share your screen with someone sitting next to you, as they'll see a consistent image from the sides.

The vertical viewing angle is good. While the viewing angles aren't consistently the same when viewing from the top or bottom, you won't notice any issues.

The gray uniformity is good. Although the edges of the screen are darker than the rest, there's a minimal amount of dirty screen effect in the center, which is great.

The black uniformity is decent. As it has a low contrast ratio and lacks a local dimming feature, blacks look gray. However, there isn't too much backlight bleed or blooming around bright objects.

The LG UltraGear 27GR93U-B has impressive accuracy before calibration in the sRGB mode. The white balance and most colors are only slightly inaccurate, but some primary colors are slightly oversaturated. The color temperature is a bit on the cold side, and gamma is higher than the target sRGB curve, so most content is slightly darker than intended. Unfortunately, the 'sRGB' Game Mode locks many settings, including Response Time, so if you want to use any of those settings, you'd have to use another picture mode that has more oversaturated colors, as you can see here.

The accuracy after calibration is fantastic. There are minimal inaccuracies, and you can use any of the settings that were locked out in the sRGB mode.

The SDR color gamut is incredible. It has perfect coverage of the common sRGB color space, and it also has excellent coverage of the Adobe RGB color space used in publishing. However, it oversaturates most colors in that color space, except cyans and blues, which are undersaturated.

The HDR color gamut is amazing. It has remarkable coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, but it struggles with tone mapping as most colors are off. The coverage in the wider Rec. 2020 color space is decent, but once again, it has some problems with tone mapping, as most colors are undersaturated.

The LG UltraGear 27GR93U-B has a decent HDR color volume. However, because it has limited HDR peak brightness and a low contrast ratio, it can't display very bright and dark colors well.

The text clarity is fantastic. Its high pixel density helps result in sharp text, and enabling Windows ClearType (top photo) improves the clarity. These photos are in Windows 10, and you can see them in Windows 11 with ClearType on and with ClearType off.

The reflection handling is great. Combined with its high peak brightness, you won't have many issues using it in a well-lit room.

The LG UltraGear 27GR93U-B has remarkable gradient handling. There's almost no banding in areas of similar color.

To reach the monitor's max refresh rate over DisplayPort, your graphics card needs to support Display Stream Compression (DSC), which any NVIDIA 16 Series or AMD RX 5000 Series and newer graphics card supports.

Besides supporting FreeSync and G-SYNC compatibility, the monitor also supports HDMI Forum VRR.

The LG 27GR93U-B has good motion handling across its entire refresh rate range with VRR enabled. Although the 'Fast' overdrive setting performs best at its max refresh rate, the 'Normal' setting is the most consistent as the refresh rate drops, with good CAD and not too much motion blur. The 'Faster' overdrive setting performs so badly that it passes the limits of the graph, as you can see here.

The refresh rate compliance is good. Although its response time struggles to keep up with its max refresh rate, this is typical of most LCD monitors, and it gets better with lower frame rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate is very good. Even though the 'Fast' overdrive setting has a bit more overshoot than 'Normal', it's still within an acceptable an amount and has lower CAD, whereas the 'Faster' overdrive setting has too much overshoot.

The CAD at 120Hz is very good. Unlike at its max refresh rate, the 'Normal' overdrive setting has the lowest CAD, which means you may have to change the setting if the frame rate of your game drops or you change games. 'Fast' actually has the same CAD, but there's more overshoot causing inverse ghosting.

The CAD at 60Hz is decent. Although the recommended overdrive setting of 'Normal' has the lowest CAD, it has some inverse ghosting, so if that bothers you, it's better to use the 'Off' setting, which has a similar CAD and has the fastest total response time.

This monitor has no optional backlight strobing feature to reduce persistence blur.

The LG 27GR93U-B has minimal VRR flicker with changing frame rates, which is fantastic.

The backlight remains flicker-free at all brightness levels, which helps reduce eye strain if you're sensitive to it.

The LG 27GR93U has low input lag for a responsive feel while gaming.

This monitor works well with the Xbox Series X|S, but you need to enable the HDMI override setting on the console for 1440p @ 60Hz to work, which also disables VRR. Keep in mind that the Xbox doesn't support HDR with 1080p or 1440p signals, so this isn't an issue with the monitor.

The 3.5mm audio output serves as a combo jack with audio out and mic in, but you need to have the USB-B cable connected to your computer to fully use it. It also supports DTS Headphones:X audio passthrough for headphones that support it.

The LG 27GR93U works well with macOS. Although it defaults to a 1080p resolution, you just need to change it to a 4k resolution. With a USB-C to DisplayPort cable, there's a bug with VRR where there's a grey bar that appears on top, which causes VRR to stop working. You need to exit the full-screen mode and go back in for it to work properly again. Over HDMI with an HDMI 2.1 MacBook, the max refresh rate is 144Hz without VRR, but it's limited to a max of 120Hz with VRR. If you're using a MacBook with either type of connection, windows return to their original position when reopening the lid or waking it up from sleep.

The LG 27GR93U has a few extra features, including:

• Black Stabilizer: Adjusts the gamma so that it's easier to see opponents in dark areas.
• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair that your game's anti-cheat tool won't detect, giving you a competitive advantage.
• DFC: Changes the contrast based on the content.
• DTS:X Headphones: The monitor offers a few different sound modes to use with DTS:X compatible devices.
• Hexagon Lighting: This is the setting to adjust the RGB lighting on the back of the monitor.
• Variable Backlight: Boosts the contrast level in HDR, but it isn't a local dimming setting.