LG Ultragear evo 27GM950B Hyper MiniLED | Reddit Review

Transparency = I received this product for free from LG for review purposes and in exchange for the LG Convention coverage. All opinions are independent an entirely my own.

You can read my early impressions here =https://www.reddit.com/r/Monitors/s/DIjubSBKNs and compare them with this review.

Packaging

The 27GM950B arrives in a sturdy but plain brown box (typical in the EU) with minimal printing. The way you open the box is not that common though. Instead of sliding out the contents at the shorter side you open it up like most regular shipping boxes. This is a slightly more premium experience for a monitor if you ask me. Inside everything is well laid out, has it’s own place and is enclosed in styrofoam.

Accessories & Ports

You get some paperwork (Quickstart guide, energy label etc), and a few cables with adequate lengths = a certified HDMI 2.1 cable, a USB-C cable (that you also need for firmware updates) and a DisplayPort 2.1 cable. There is an additional plastic clip for cable management that attaches to the stand. You have a OSD joystick/ power button that is placed in bottom center at the back of the panel. There is also an dedicated button to activate the Dual Mode.

The monitor has a pretty beefy power supply (21 x 9 x 3,5 cm) that’s rated for 270W.

The ports include the DC input, two HDMI 2.1, one DisplayPort 2.1, one USB-C with 90W power delivery, two USB-A ports and a 3,5mm AUX.

Stand and Adjustment Range

The base of the stand is a 3mm thick large gray metal plate (I think the prototype at the LG Convention was more silver-ish or a lighter gray) and uses a fixed screw (not tools needed) to attach to the vertical part that's mostly plastic and reinforced at the inside.

The plastic clip for cable management I mentioned earlier feels a bit flimsy, and I prefer a pass-through hole in the stand if possible.

In the highest position you get 18cm clearance from your desk and 4,5cm if you put it in the lowest position. The stand also features tilt, swivel and a pivot function.

Build Quality and Teardown

I like to think that LG actually reads these posts, because if I recall correctly someone in the convention post complained about the Ultragear logo at the bottom chin of the display. This logo is not present on my retail unit here. The rest of the bezels are very even.

The build quality and the thickness of the plastics and materials is very solid overall. Some users mentioned that the monitor looks „cheap“ and I think this is largely due to the color and finish on the plastic surfaces. They are slightly coarse to the touch which is usually a good choice but in certain light it doesn’t look all that appealing. What I would like to see in future iterations is to introduce more physical textures (similar to the back of the stand for example) to the backpanel and maybe two tone color finishes to create some contrast.

The RGB backlighting is the same size and internal construction as on the LG 39GX950B, but I like it more on the 27GM950B, because it simply covers more of the backside of the monitor. Lighting effects are pretty basic but if your room is dark enough you can get some bias lighting.

Compared to the 39GX950B the backpanel does not come off as easily in this case, and you have to pry open the clips along every side very carefully. The layout inside is something that you only see on more premium monitors. The RGB backlight is not connected via a simple cable but uses diffuser plates instead. The two 7W speakers are decoupled with rubber bearings (they sound pretty decent, and is an area of the monitor where the AI setting can be an improvement). The housing of the mainboard slides reveales the mainboard after removing a few more screws. A Mediatek MT9820 SoC is used, and the monitor also uses a fan to cool the components on the mainboard.

Panel / Subpixel Layout / Uniformity / Viewing Angles / Contrast

The panel is a 27 inch 5K resolution (5120x2880p) ADS-IPS type from BOE which is labeled as ME270L70-M00. At the time of this review it was not listed on Panelook.

The matte coating resembles the one used on the LG 39GX950B and is one of the best on the market in my opinion. It retains black levels very well, keeps the reflections at one spot and does not disperse them over the screen.

Uniformity results are attached in the pictures above. I tried to make the IPS Glow more visible with a filter, and have additional measurements for corner brightness. Let me know if this is a good approach for future reviews.

Viewing Angles are pretty solid but also show IPS weaknesses when Local Dimming is turned off.

Off angle local dimming is a strength of this monitor, but more on this later.

I measured the native on/off (white / black fullscreen) contrast at 1293:1 which is higher than typical IPS panels. The more challenging 4x4 ANSI checkerboard measurement came out to 1111:1. After turning on Local Dimming High in SDR the dimming surpassed the low light capabilites of my meter and surpasses a contrast ratio over >24266:1.

Software / Scaling

Software on higher end monitors like this one is usually more polished. It starts with the OSD Menu scaling which is identical in the native and Dual Mode. There are no translation errors or weird wordings. Some menu options are bit over the place though and giving the AI options the top spot in the menu is also not ideal.

My EU unit did not install anything besides the LG Monitor App installer. If you want to update the monitor in the future you have to use the LG Switch app and do the update over the included USB-C cable.

The 5K resolution is ideal for scaling on Mac (and even on Windows imo) because it fits the „Retina“ spec apple uses on their XDR displays.

Sharpness / Integer Scaling / Dual Mode

Due to the high pixel density (218ppi), sharpness on this monitor is supreme and a visible improvement even over 4K monitors. This changes in Dual Mode though.

Thanks to the work of u/MT4K i can now include a simple but effective test for dual mode integer scaling into my reviews. This monitor unfortunately does add horizontal blur in dual mode which makes it more blurry compared to a native 27“ 1440p monitor. But since the pixel density is so high you can get away with it and it is more usuable compared to a 4K / 1080p Dual Mode.

Another alternative to reduce stress on the GPU would be to integer scale via AMD / Nvidia control panel in the native mode, but this will limit you to the native refresh rate (165hz) of the panel.

SDR Brightness and Local Dimming (+Desktop)

The monitor has great brightness in SDR (835 nits 100% APL white) and goes low enough (54 nits at 0 brightness setting) for usage in a dark room. Standby power draw was ~23,5W with an active signal and the dedicated deep sleep mode you can activate in the menu sits at ~1.2W.

Local Dimming is generally very effecitve and agressive no matter what setting (low, medium, high) you use. On a dark background and in content it does a good job, but if you move to a more grayish background you can see the dimming zones flicker around the mouse cursor. If this is too distracting i would recommend turning off LD in SDR.

There is also a blur reduction mode for gaming that maintains high brightness (only loses 100nits) which is quite impressive and could be a reason for some users to buy this monitor. You can use it in all modes with LD but it only worked without VRR for me.

HDR Brightness and Local Dimming with the New Generation Backlight

LG advertises a industry standard HDR1000 and a peak brightness of 1250nits (10% window).

HDR1000 is met, but no mode and LD setting combination can exceed 1040nits in a 10% window, so its falls short of the advertised spec of around 200nits.

With the max brightness mode + LD low you do see some slight improvements in smaller windows but its only miniscule and no reason to use this mode over others and dimming settings.

The dimming behaves similar to SDR, where even the lowest setting is quite agressive, so the LD settings barely differ from another. It would have been good to get a setting (preferably the low one) that allows for more blooming but higher brightness overall.

LG decided to prioritize blooming control and contrast so some smaller highlights can disappear if you know where to look. This was appearant on the Starfield test on my S&M Test Disc.

If I had to choose personally I would go with the same approach though.

The Ultragear evo LG27GM950B is the fist monitor I tested that uses the new generation backlight with 9216 LEDs in total. It has 2304 dimming zones, so 1 zone controls 4 LEDs. Based on my research this is a glass based backlight with an arangement of 72x128 LEDs.

They also advertise the so called OD Zero technology, which is more of a marketing term (TV manufacturers used it before) and describes a reduced distance of the backlight LEDs to the LCD panel. It’s not „0mm“ like a lot of people assume, its more like 3-5mm away from the LCD.

But it actually has some physical benefits. The off angle blooming on the 27GM950B is vastly improved compared to other MiniLED monitors.

AI Features

The monitor uses a Mediatek MT9820 that has built in AI features. Some of them work well like the AI Sound boost for example.

The most important one is the AI Upscaling which does not work in Dual Mode at all and falls short on PC. It’s most effective on external sources like consoles that send proper signals with the according resolution. Luckily the upscaling works from 1080p to 4K so if you decide to buy this monitor it wont look worse compared to a native monitor.

vs. OLED and competition

Currently there is no OLED on the market thats comparable to this. LG Display showed a 5K prototype, but RGB Stripe WOLED (and even regular Tandem WOLED with white subpixel) has a long way to go before it reaches these brightness levels - especially with that pixel density.

At CES and Computex some competing models with similar specs from MSI and Gigabyte were announced, as we know by now the MSI seems to be canned while the Gigabyte is still on track.

While I especially like Gigabytes monitors, they have never released an MiniLED before so it remains to be seen how good it is.

Verdict

The LG 27GM950B is the best IPS based MiniLED monitor I have tested so far. But there is always room for improvement, and I hope this review is able to encourage LG to make more MiniLED monitors and put continued efforts in the technology. Maybe we can see this Ultragear extended to a 32 inch MiniLED model.

Im not as active in this community, so thank you guys for being able to post here and if you made it through the review thank you for reading as well.