It is not correct It’s easy for a gaming monitor to stand out. Once you hit a few key specs—at least 1440p, 120 Hz, 0.1 millisecond response time, and a few more—nearly any monitor will do. Some companies counter this by improving their color reproduction or tweaking those specs even higher. Then there’s BenQ, the company that decided to make this ridiculously large 48-inch model that I spent a few weeks testing this out.
As a monitor, the BenQ Mobiuz OLED gaming monitor—specifically the EX480UZ model—is impressive. On a spec sheet, it ticks all the boxes you want when playing the game. It has a 4K OLED panel, a 120 Hz refresh rate (we wanted to see 144 Hz, but it’s not bad) and even supports HDR.
The only problem is it big. The average computer monitor is usually between 22 and 24 inches. This one is 48 inches. It’s not just twice the size of a regular screen. Because How does math work?doubling diagonal size means quadruple area. So, if you’re reading this article on a 24-inch monitor, imagine three more screens stitched together. All sitting at your table.
That’s a lot to put in.
(Gigantic) Image quality
Before we tackle this huge size, let’s talk about how it works. In general, gaming monitors often omit some of the features you might expect from a TV, for example. High dynamic range (HDR), a color enhancement feature found on this BenQ monitor, is sometimes not available on gaming monitors. But it is one of the best upgrades you can make to get better image quality, so it’s nice to see it here.
BenQ’s implementation is also particularly good. Unlike most LED displays that rely on an LED backlight system to illuminate the upper display, OLED displays are a single pixel-sized layer of organic LEDs capable of illuminating only the pixels that the display can’t see. photo needed. This means much deeper black levels. While the standard screen still looks a bit gray when displaying a black screen, the OLED screen is completely dark; The pixels are actually black. This better contrast between light and dark improved the picture on games without HDR, but when I played games that supported HDR, the picture was almost as sharp as it could be.
The monitor also supports AMD FreeSync, which helps AMD graphics cards synchronize with the display without frame drops up to 120 Hz. I play guard. Any game with fast-paced action will benefit from super high frame rates.
But when we talk about image quality, we’re not talking about pixels. A lot of other factors affect the viewing experience, such as how far away you sit from the screen. This is why so many gaming monitors can get away with just 1440p screens. While 1440p has a lower resolution than 4K, it’s often enough that individual pixels are nearly invisible on smaller screens, when you’re sitting at a normal distance from your desk.
But this BenQ monitor is not a standard gaming monitor.
The burden of width
The first time I set up this monitor, I tried to start a game guard and almost immediately had to stop. I don’t exactly have a small desk—its surface area is about 2.5 feet deep by 5 feet wide—but I had to remove both of my 27-inch monitors to make room for it. Even so, and no matter how far I sat in the chair, the screen flooded.
guard‘S extermination—a running feed of dead players in the upper-right corner of the screen—now towered over my head. What I used to be able to check with my eyeballs suddenly required me to move my entire head to see. If I want to see my own health level in game, it’s all in the bottom left corner. My neck starts to hurt as I try to grasp important information.
Vivid screens are also starting to become a serious problem. Vivid OLED displays are great for emitting light to create compelling images. The only problem is that this photo is a few feet away from my face. And it filled my peripheral vision. I started to feel sensory overload the longer I sat in front of it. That’s just too much of a good thing.
“It’s TV”
It didn’t take long before I couldn’t stand this on my desk anymore. After a few games, I unplugged and put my old monitor back in. But maybe I’m using it wrong, I thought. I mean, this thing is basically a TV – it’s worth noting that’s also what people who saw it in my house said. “That thing is basically a TV.”
So I moved it from my desk to the living room. And it feels more at home there. Suddenly, the 4K panel doesn’t feel so necessary. When I sat 10 feet or more away from the screen, it was no longer overwhelming and I was able to appreciate the level of detail in the image. It’s not the best TV I’ve seen, but it provided a really nice picture as I played through some of my PS5 games.
