View from the Labs

How do you cut through the marketing speak that litters web pages promoting the latest gaming monitors? Tim Danton has the answer, and you’re holding it

I magine, just for a moment, a world where you could visit a product’s homepage and it wasn’t full of near-meaningless, buzzword-packed, jargonistic nonsense. For the past month, while I’ve been physically surrounded on all sides by gaming monitors in my 12 x 8ft testing lab, I’ve also been drowning in phrases like “next-gen gameplay” and “precision to the max” and even “a new era of immersion”.

We’re all used to marketing hyperbole, of course, but for gaming monitors it’s ramped up to such an extreme that the words are rendered almost meaningless. What the world needs is a plugin that strips away all the fluff, all the claims that can’t be backed up by evidence, to leave a stripped-bare page filled with useful information.

I have some sympathy. The challenge for manufacturers is that the two major problems that used to plague gamers have been cracked. If you buy a gaming monitor, you can rest assured that adaptive sync technologies and fast response times mean tearing and ghosting will never plague your games again.

And, almost without exception, all these monitors cover such a wide gamut of colours that games and movies alike look superb.

Only one technology allows some monitors to pull away in terms of visual impact, and that’s HDR. Once you’ve enjoyed your favourite game in HDR – or sat back and watched a Netflix film that takes full advantage of the technology – on a suitably equipped monitor, it’s hard to go back.

With the world of marketing intent on smothering people with extraneous information, then, my plugin would turn each page into a two-word description: HDR bad, HDR okay, HDR great. It would certainly make the decision-making process a lot shorter. Oh, and only screens that can hit 600cd/m2 or higher would get that “great accolade” by the way.

I fear that we don’t live in such a world, and never will. So, in lieu of such a plugin, I only hope that this Labs helps you cut through the marketing buzz to find your perfect partner.