OLED monitors are all the rage these days and for good reason. Their inherent benefits such as instantaneous response times and infinite contrast ratio offer unparalleled (at least until Micro LED is mainstream) image quality that has only gotten cheaper over time. Monitor manufacturers employ OLED as their frontier for innovation that eventually drives down costs or takes the next step forward for the tech. As such, LG Display has just announced what it's touting as the "World's Fastest Gaming OLED" — a 27-inch 540 Hz monitor with QHD resolution. The existence of such a panel was confirmed in June by LG itself, and now we've arrived at the unveiling.
The new monitor, shown recently at the K-Display trade show in South Korea, features LG's 4th Gen Tandem OLED with Primary RGB Tandem technology. This design stacks red, green, and blue light-emitting layers as independent sources, unlike traditional OLEDs that combine emitters into a single layer. The result is significantly higher peak brightness—up to 4,000 nits—and improved color luminance (more brightness for colors), something that QD-OLED is more known for. This differs from the dual-stack Tandem OLED used in iPads, which sandwiches two similar OLED layers to boost efficiency and lifespan, but does not use separate RGB layers.
Anyhow, LG's 540 Hz OLED monitor does indeed snatch the crown for the fastest OLED monitor in the world from Samsung, who previously held the world record for their 500 Hz panels, but those panels didn't have this other trick up their sleeves. While it's a 1440p panel, the LG monitor features dual mode functionality that will allow you to boost its 540 Hz native refresh rate to 720 Hz at HD resolution (read: 720p). It's hard to imagine anyone playing at 720p anymore, even esports professionals, but it's still nice to have the ability to do so in your back pocket.
Moreover, it boasts a highly impressive 99.5% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, along with a peak brightness of 1,500 nits. It's important to note that only LG's Tandem OLED TVs can get as bright as 4,000 nits—that too at only the small 2% windows—while the monitor is "stuck" at 1,500 nits, which is still plenty bright for that HDR effect. There are no pricing or availability details for this monitor yet, but we did see LG's other Tandem OLED monitor launch a few days ago in China for a converted price of $510 USD. That was only a 1440p 280 Hz panel so expect this dual-mode 540 Hz beast to cost a lot more.
Also on display (no pun intended) at the show was LG's new 45" ultrawide monitor with a 5K2K resolution. The company is calling this the sharpest OLED monitor to date because it has a 125 PPI pixel density that's unusually high for a non-Apple monitor. It uses the LG's 3rd Gen MLA+ panel because it's not a new product launch; you can already find it on sale on Amazon for the low-low price of $1,799. Regardless, it features a 165 Hz native refresh rate that can double to 330 Hz at half the resolution, as part of its dual mode functionality.
Lastly, the company also showed off an 83-inch OLED TV with the same Primary RGB Tandem tech discussed earlier. This marks the debut of Tandem OLED on a large format display and it, along with the 540 Hz monitor, are the only two displays with LG's cutting-edge 4th Gen Tandem OLED panel. This is LG Display's latest, bold answer to Samsung, its main competitor in this field. Both frequently try to one-up each other with different approaches to the same underlying OLED tech. You can read our WOLED vs QD-OLED feature to learn more, but the main takeaway is that both are ultimately great at the end of the day.
