LG 27GX700A-B  Monitor Review

The LG 27GX700A-B has a gaming-oriented design that's similar to other UltraGear monitors. It's mainly made of plastic, with the base of the stand and panel housing being metal. There's also some branding and RGB lighting on the back.

The build quality is excellent. It's made of high-quality materials that don't bend easily, feel premium, and aren't easily susceptible to fingerprint smudges. Overall, it feels very well-made and there aren't any obvious issues.

The ergonomics are great. You can adjust it how you like, and the adjustments feel smooth on the stand. The stand also features a cutout for cable management.

The stand has a metal base and a plastic pillar. It holds the screen well with minimal wobble, and it quickly stabilizes if it does wobble.

The housing height measurement includes the reflective plastic bar below the bottom bezel. The bezel measurement includes 2 mm of extra space on either side that the monitor uses to shift the image with the OLED Screen Move setting.

There's a joystick to control the on-screen display and turn the monitor on/off. It feels stiff, but it's still easy to navigate the OSD.

• HDMI cable
• DisplayPort cable
• USB-A to USB-B cable
• Power brick and cable
• User guides

LG 27GX700A-B has a near-infinite contrast ratio for perfect blacks against bright highlights.

Like other WOLEDs, the black levels change depending on the refresh rate. The gamma rises at low refresh rates, worsening the black levels, and in turn the contrast ratio, as you can see at 280Hz, 120Hz, and 60Hz.

This monitor doesn't have a backlight, so it doesn't require a local dimming feature. However, with a near-infinite contrast ratio, there isn't any haloing around bright objects, and it's the equivalent of a perfect local dimming feature. We still film these videos on the monitor so you can see how the screen performs and compare it with a monitor that has local dimming.

Settings

• Game Mode: Gamer 1 (after calibration)
• Brightness: 100
• Peak Brightness: High

The LG 27GX700A has great SDR brightness. Its RGB Tandem OLED panel offers a significant improvement in brightness over other OLEDs. It fights glare in bright rooms well, but it doesn't maintain consistent brightness across different content. You may notice that the brightness changes when minimizing and maximizing windows.

The monitor gets the brightest with Peak Brightness set to 'High.' However, if you want the dimmest screen possible, you need to turn it off; otherwise, the minimum brightness with it on 'High' is 26 cd/m². You can see the results with the other Peak Brightness settings below:

Settings:

• Game Mode: Gamer 1
• Brightness: 100
• Peak Brightness: High
• Smart Energy Saving: Off
• All OLED care settings disabled

The HDR brightness is good. The RGB Tandem OLED panel allows small highlights to get much brighter than other OLEDs, so they really pop against dark backgrounds. While it can't maintain this high brightness with larger highlights covering more of the screen, it's still bright enough for an impactful HDR experience.

Although it gets the brightest with Peak Brightness on 'High,' it's also inaccurate with this setting. It crushes blacks and overbrightens most content. Peak Brightness set to 'Low' is much more accurate, but it's dimmer, so you have to choose between high brightness or accurate images. Disabling Peak Brightness is also inaccurate as content is darker than intended. You can see the full results with 'Low' and 'Off' below:

The gray uniformity with mid and bright grays is excellent. The screen is uniform throughout, but the uniformity is worse with dark grays, as others have reported online. There's visible vertical banding that you'll notice even with regular content that has dark areas. Running OLED Image Cleaning cycles reduces the banding, but doesn't improve it, as you can see with 15% gray:

• Out of the box
• After first pixel refresh cycle
• After second pixel refresh cycle

You don't see this issue with bright grays.

The accuracy before calibration is fantastic. It has a dedicated 'sRGB' Game Mode that locks colors well to the sRGB color space, so they aren't oversaturated. It also has minimal white balance and color inaccuracies, and the color temperature is almost spot-on with the 6500K target.

These results are with Peak Brightness off. Even though its gamma tracking is a bit off, with most content being brighter than intended, it's still more accurate than setting Peak Brightness to 'Low' or 'High.' Gamma is way too bright with these settings, as you can see below:

• Peak Brightness: Low - Gamma set to Mode 2
• Peak Brightness: High - Gamma set to Mode 2
• Peak Brightness: High - Gamma set to Mode 3

Using the 'sRGB' Game Mode locks most picture settings, including Color Temp and Gamma. You'd have to use another mode with oversaturated colors if you want access to those settings.

The accuracy after calibration is fantastic. A full calibration fixes gamma issues, while improving colors and the white balance. You also have access to settings that are locked out in the sRGB mode.

Although the monitor has customizable RGB color and two-point white balance settings, you can achieve the best accuracy with a proper calibration using external software.

The LG 27GX700A-B has a superb SDR color gamut. It has perfect coverage of the common sRGB color space. It also covers most of the wider Adobe RGB color space, but it oversaturates colors in the process.

The HDR color gamut is remarkable. It covers most of the DCI-P3 color space, and while it's more limited in the Rec. 2020 color space, it has minimal inaccuracies in either.

The RGB Tandem OLED panel allows for better color purity compared to previous-generation WOLED panels. You can see this with its spectral power distribution (SPD) graph compared to the SPD of the LG 27GX790A-B, which uses a third-gen WOLED panel.

The HDR color volume is excellent. Like previous-generation WOLED panels, it still relies on a white subpixel, so pure white is brighter than other colors. Vivid colors are also brighter than older WOLEDs, but it still doesn't have the same remarkable color volume as a QD-OLED monitor, like the MSI MPG 271QRX QD-OLED.

The text clarity is okay. Programs don't properly render text with its RGWB subpixel layout, so there's fringing around letters, and text looks worse than LCD monitors with the same pixel density. How much this bothers you changes from person to person.

These photos are in Windows 10, and you can also see them in Windows 11 with ClearType on and with ClearType off.

The direct reflection handling is great. The matte coating absorbs light well, but it still spreads remaining light out towards the top and bottom edges.

The LG 27GX700A-B retains low black levels in a bright room, so you get its deep and inky blacks in any environment. However, there's still a purple tint if you have a bright light pointing directly to the screen, which you can see in this video, so it's best to avoid placing it opposite a sunny window.

There aren't many distracting reflections on the LG 27GX700A. It absorbs light well, but it stretches reflections towards the top and bottom edges of the screen, which can get distracting if you have it in a sunny room.

The LG 27GX700A has fantastic gradient handling. There's minimal banding between shades of different colors, but as explained in Gray Uniformity, there are visible vertical bars with dark colors. You can see this effect with darker colors in the gradient test image.

To reach the monitor's max refresh rate over HDMI, you need to set Input Compatibility Version to '2.1 (PC)', and your graphics card won't need to use Display Stream Compression (DSC). However, setting it to '2.1 (AV)' limits the refresh rate to 120Hz, even if it's still using HDMI 2.1 bandwidth.

When connecting over DisplayPort, your graphics card needs to use DSC with 8 and 10-bit signals. There's a setting to turn off DSC if you prefer, but strangely, we were still able to get the max refresh rate with the setting disabled and by using a custom resolution, so we're not sure if DSC is actively working.

The LG UltraGear 27GX700A also supports HDMI Forum VRR.

The LG 27GX700A-B has superb motion handling across its VRR range. Motion is incredibly sharp, and any blur at low refresh rates is persistence blur.

The refresh rate compliance is remarkable. Thanks to its near-instantaneous response time, it makes full-color transitions before the monitor draws the next frame at most frame rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 280Hz is incredible. Motion looks incredibly sharp without any noticeable inverse ghosting.

The CAD at 120Hz is superb. It has a near-instant response time with almost any transition, leading to minimal blur, but there's more persistence blur than at its max refresh rate.

The CAD at 60Hz is fantastic. Any blur you see is persistence blur, and not caused by a slow response time.

The LG 27GX700A doesn't have an optional black frame insertion feature to reduce persistence blur. 

This monitor has noticeable VRR flicker with changing frame rates. Although it looks worse in the video than in person, the flicker is still distracting, particularly in dark scenes.

While not the same as pulse-width modulation (PWM), there's a slight dip in brightness that corresponds to the monitor's refresh rate. There's also an additional dip or jump halfway through the cycle.

The LG 27GX700A-B has low input lag for a responsive feel at any refresh rate. 

As the monitor supports HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, it supports all signals with a PS5. However, it needs to downscale 4k signals, which are more detailed than native 1440p signals.

As the monitor supports HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, it supports almost all signals with an Xbox Series X|S, but it doesn't support Dolby Vision. However, it needs to downscale 4k signals, which are more detailed than native 1440p signals. This is the only way to get HDR, as the Xbox doesn't support HDR with 1080p and 1440p signals.

The audio jack serves as a combo jack for both audio out and mic in. It supports DTS Headphone:X to simulate surround sound audio.

Tested with: M2 MacBook Pro (Sequoia 15.6.1)

This monitor works well with macOS. There aren't any obvious issues, except for the fact that you can't get the max 280Hz refresh rate over HDMI.

If you're using a MacBook, the 'Gamer 2' Game Mode looks the most accurate compared to the laptop's screen in HDR, but HDR appears dim compared to SDR. 

If you close the MacBook's lid while being plugged into power, you can continue working on the monitor. However, if the MacBook isn't plugged into power and you close the lid, the monitor goes to sleep. Windows return to their original positions when reopening the lid, or waking the laptop up from sleep.

The LG 27GX700A-B has a few features, including:

• Aspect Ratio: Changes the aspect ratio of the image.
• Black Stabilizer: Adjusts the black level so that it's easier to see opponents in dark scenes.
• Crosshair: Adds a virtual crosshair that your system's anti-cheat tool won't detect.
• DTS Headphone:X: Simulates surround sound audio with headphones. It offers three different sound modes.
• FPS Counter: Shows the current frame rate from your source.
• Hexagon Lighting: Allows you to customize the RGB lighting on the back of the monitor.
• OLED Screen Move: This is a pixel shift feature that slightly moves the image so that the pixels aren't always displaying the same thing.
• OLED Screen Saver: Turns the screen off after a period of inactivity.
• OLED Image Cleaning: Runs a 10-minute pixel refresh cycle to help reduce the risk of burn-in.