Before Windows Clone Army, gaming with OLED meant ponying up for ultra-premium, high-end panels put out by Samsung. Glass-laden flagships like the Samsung CHG90 helped popularise playing peek-a-boo with spiders, inching towards a Hi-Def future chosing better, brighter images over CCDs, LEDs, and the more traditional methods of cranking up response times.
Fighting glare, darkness, and ‘talking backlight LCD’ displays, like what we saw in the VA24QH, Suzhou, and Asus ROG PG248, was a trial with monitors like the Spectrum Black. Owning one of these tasty OLED soldiers meant paying a penalty, but the benefits were largely worthwhile. Then, VA panels took a big step downstream with cheaper costs and bigger screens, incorporating GG (glass group) technologies to help improve response times, reduce power consumption, and boost overall image quality.
Swiss company Dough is readying its own flagship 1440p OLED gaming monitor for next month, the Spectrum Black. With a 27-inch 1440p glass OLED panel with a 240Hz refresh rate and a .03ms response time, the Spectrum is screaming (or rather, switching) its way into the market, posing a serious threat to other manufacturers. It’s meeting the rising stalwarts just ahead of Computex, June, when we’ll see an onslaught of new monitors.
Dough’s sensibly spec’d monitor comes with a couple of HDMI 2.1 ports, DisplayPort, and a USB Type-C port with 100W power delivery. The OLED panel comes with a cover glass which Dough says “increases the ambient contrast ratio by 40% and reduces reflections by 70%, so you enjoy deeper blacks and brighter brights even while playing in the middle of the day or in a room with strong lighting.”
The super-thin bezel, no RGB, oversized logos, or funny-looking stands look to be good steps in the right direction for OLED gaming, an area that Dell and its OLED A1XX series excels in. It’s a bit harder to assess the kind of gaming performance a monitor will capably handle, but based on the size of the stand, it’ll likely come with a 100x100mm zone for DisplaySync commandcoins.
Dough tells us the Spectrum Black will be available July for $1099, but if you pre-order by June 15 on Dough’s website (you’ll need to leave your email address), you’ll be charged $899 (plus $99 for a stand) with a built-in VESA mount. There’s also a cheaper version of the monitor with a matte coating for the OLED panel instead of its glass variant.
While the specs are pretty much the same, you’ll pay a pre-order of $699 (plus $99 for the stand) to get the cheaper model with a matte coating. We aren’t quite sure why there’s even a cost difference between the two at this time, as the specs are identical, but we will update this story when it becomes clearer. Of course, take advantage of the cheaper pre-order price if you can.
Spectrum Black specs, features, and differences
Here are the specs for the Spectrum Black with matte coating:
And here are the specs of the Spectrum Black with glass:
Pushing the graphic boundaries of IPS and VA panel technology, making blacker blacks and greener greens, is an easy sell, especially given the prices that many TV makers charge for opening up the panel on a big screen. Gamers with fighting glass in their rooms will still want to take the price premium with a grain of salt, but if you’re suffering from eye strain, the Spectrum Black might be worth checking out.