LG 49GR85DC-B  Monitor Review

The LG 49GR85DC-B has a gamer-oriented design with a hexagon shape on the back that features RGB lighting. It has wide-set feet and thick bezels, with an even thicker bottom bezel. The aggressive 1000R curve also helps bring the edges of the screen closer to you.

The build quality is great. It's mainly plastic, while the feet on the stand are metal. The screen stays in place on the stand very well, and you won't accidentally move it, but that means it takes some force when you want to adjust it. There's still some wobble due to its large size, but it quickly stabilizes itself. Other than that, there aren't any obvious issues, and the materials feel well-made.

The LG 49GR85DC has decent ergonomics for a super ultrawide monitor. While the range of adjustments is limited, placing it in an ideal position is still easy. The stand also features a clip for cable management, and the monitor comes with a hook that you can use as a mouse bungee, which you can attach to either side of the monitor.

The wide-set feet occupy a lot of space on your desk, but there's enough space to put stuff like your keyboard between the feet. The thickness measurement is from the sides of the screen to the back of the stand, and the thickness from the center of the screen to the back of the stand is 9.1 inches (23.0 cm).

The thickness measurement is from the sides of the screen to the back of it, and the thickness from the center to the back of the screen is 2.8 inches (7.2 cm).

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

• HDMI cable
• DisplayPort cable
• USB-B to USB-A cable
• Power cable
• Mouse bungee clip
• User guides

Despite having a VA panel, the LG 49GR85DC-B has a limited contrast ratio. While it's better than most IPS panels, it doesn't display the same deep blacks as other monitors with a VA panel, like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9/G95NA S49AG95. Its local dimming feature fails to improve the black levels, so blacks look gray next to bright highlights.

This monitor has a local dimming feature, but it performs terribly. With only 12 edge-lit dimming zones, it fails to improve the picture quality in dark scenes, and any bright object causes an entire zone to light up. Because of this, there's a ton of blooming, and it's clear when objects transition across dimming zones. Even if you're watching 16:9 or 21:9 content with black bars on the side, there's distracting blooming around the main image. Overall, the feature doesn't add much, and it's better to disable it if you find the blooming distracting. Luckily, you can deactivate it even in HDR. If you want a super ultrawide monitor with a better local dimming feature, consider the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9/G95NC S57CG95.

The SDR brightness is great. It gets bright enough to fight glare in a well-lit room. The Real Scene result has a 32:9 aspect ratio, and the brightness with a 16:9 aspect ratio is 402 cd/m², so it maintains its brightness consistently with different content. However, a bug causes the screen to get temporarily brighter when closing windows, and then it goes back to its original brightness, but it happens very fast. Other times, the brightness would jump to its max even with the brightness setting put to something lower, and it would only go back to normal after restarting the monitor.

These results are from after calibration in the 'Gamer 1' Game Mode with the Brightness at its max, Smart Energy Saving disabled, and Local Dimming on 'Faster'. If you find the local dimming feature distracting and choose to disable it, it still gets bright as it reaches 300 cd/m² with most content.

The LG 49GR85DC has excellent HDR peak brightness. It gets very bright when highlights first appear on the screen, but it doesn't sustain this brightness for long as larger highlights get dimmer over time. The Real Scene result is with a 32:9 aspect ratio, reaching 820 cd/m² with a 16:9 aspect ratio. These results are in the 'Gamer 1' Game Mode with the Brightness at its max, Smart Energy Saving disabled, and Local Dimming on 'Faster'.

The horizontal viewing angle is disappointing. The image fades and looks inconsistent from the sides. This is also problematic if you sit close to the screen as the edges look washed out, but with its aggressive curve, it's less of a problem if you sit a bit further back from the screen.

The vertical viewing angle is poor. The image is inconsistent if you're standing up and looking down on the screen.

The gray uniformity is great. For such a large screen, it displays areas of the same color well throughout, and while there's a bit of dirty screen effect in the center and banding towards the edges, this is only noticeable with full-screen documents or webpages.

This monitor has poor black uniformity. There's noticeable clouding with local dimming off, and while enabling it helps improve the black levels a bit, there's more blooming.

The LG 49GR85DC-B has great accuracy before calibration in the sRGB mode. It limits colors well to the sRGB color space, but some blues and cyans are still oversaturated, and not all colors are perfectly accurate. The white balance is also off, particularly with brighter shades of gray, and gamma follows a 2.2 target instead of sRGB, so all scenes are inaccurate. On the plus side, the color temperature is close to the 6500K target. The sRGB mode locks some picture settings, including Black Stabilizer and Response Time, so if you want to use those for gaming, you'll need to use another, less accurate mode, whose results you can see here.

The accuracy after a full calibration is fantastic. Calibrating it fixes most issues, but some yellows and reds are still slightly off.

The LG 49GR85DC-B has a fantastic SDR color gamut. It perfectly displays the entire sRGB color space and has great coverage of the Adobe RGB color space used in professional editing. Still, it undersaturates greens and cyans, and reds are oversaturated.

The LG 49GR85DC has a good HDR color gamut. It's great with the commonly-used DCI-P3 color space but has a more narrow color gamut in the wider Rec. 2020 color space. However, tone mapping with whites is off in both color spaces, and most colors are slightly inaccurate but not terribly so.

The HDR color volume is excellent. It displays most colors well, but they don't get as bright as pure white.

This monitor has trouble displaying proper text and isn't as good as other 5120x1440 monitors like the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9/G95NA S49AG95. It's fine if you enable Windows ClearType (top photo), but letters aren't sharp. These photos are in Windows 10, and while it's slightly better in Windows 11 as you can see with ClearType on and ClearType off, it still isn't good. The aggressive matte screen coating also contributes to letters looking blurry.

The LG 49GR85DC-B has very good reflection handling. The matte screen coating does a good job of reducing glare from bright light sources, and, combined with its great peak brightness, you won't have issues using it in a well-lit room.

The gradient handling is remarkable. You won't notice banding with most content.

The LG 49GR85DC-B supports Display Stream Compression (DSC), meaning you can reach its max refresh rate over DisplayPort and HDMI as long as your graphics card also supports DSC, which any NVIDIA 16 Series or AMD RX 5000 Series and newer graphics card supports.

This monitor supports all common types of VRR, including HDMI Forum VRR.

The LG 49GR85DC-B has good motion handling with VRR enabled. The biggest downside is that it has noticeable smearing, which is typical of VA panels, and it also has a bit of inverse ghosting. The 'Fast' Response Time setting is extremely consistent across its refresh rate range, and it has the lowest CAD with most refresh rates, besides at 240Hz.

This monitor has great refresh rate compliance. The 'Fast' overdrive setting has the consistently best compliance, and while it struggles to keep up with fast frame rates, the compliance is better at lower frame rates.

The CAD at the max refresh rate of 240Hz is decent. There's noticeable smearing, and the recommended overdrive setting of 'Faster' has overshoot that causes inverse ghosting. If that bothers you, the 'Fast' setting has less overshoot, but also more blur.

The CAD at 120Hz is good. Unlike at its max refresh rate, the recommended overdrive setting is 'Fast' because 'Faster' has too much overshoot, leading to inverse ghosting. That said, 'Fast' still has noticeable smearing and blur.

The CAD at 60Hz is decent. The 'Fast' overdrive setting has some overshoot, leading to inverse ghosting, and there's noticeable smearing and blur. The 'Normal' setting is similar, but it also has noticeable blur.

The LG 49GR85DC-B doesn't have an optional backlight strobing feature.

The LG 49GR85DC-B has noticeable VRR flicker with changing frame rates. It's most visible in dark scenes, and while it isn't as distracting in bright scenes, you can still see it in shadows. This isn't so much of an issue if you have a consistent frame rate though.

The backlight only uses pulse width modulation (PWM) with the Brightness setting at '29' and below, and it's flicker-free above that. Even when it flickers, it's such a high flicker frequency that you won't notice it.

The LG 49GR85DC has low input lag for a responsive feel while gaming.

The monitor can take full advantage of the PS5, but because the console doesn't support ultrawide gaming, you'll see black bars on the sides.

The only quirk about this monitor with the Xbox Series X|S is that 1440p @ 60Hz only works by enabling the Xbox's HDMI override setting, which also disables VRR. Because the console doesn't support ultrawide gaming, you'll see black bars on the sides. Keep in mind that the Xbox doesn't support HDR with 1080p or 1440p signals, so this isn't a limitation of 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 comes with DTS Headphone:X to simulate surround sound audio.

The LG 49GR85DC-B works well with macOS using a DisplayPort to USB-C cable, but you're limited to a max refresh rate of 144Hz with that connection. HDR looks washed out but isn't as bad as other monitors. It supports VRR, but it doesn't always work and flickers sometimes, which can get distracting. Like the LG 27GR95QE-B, a thin gray bar appears in games at times, but it quickly disappears. If you're using a MacBook, windows stay in place when closing the lid and return to their original position when waking the laptop up from sleep. If you have a Mac computer that supports HDMI 2.1, you can reach the full 240Hz refresh rate over HDMI.

The LG 49GR85DC-B 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.
• FPS Counter: Displays a frame rate counter.
• Hexagon Lighting: This is the setting to adjust the RGB lighting on the back of the monitor.
• PBP/PIP: Lets you view images from two sources at once, and you can customize how you want to view the two images.