ALIENWARE 55 OLED
This huge gaming monitor is a thing of true beauty
Around $6,000 dell.com
Take this monitor/TV hybrid out of the box – which is actually quite hard considering that the top half is exposed wafer-thin, super-light OLED and the bottom is weighty chassis stuffed full of silicon (total weight without stand is 25.5kg) – and the first thing that hits you is how aesthetically pleasing it is.
A product of the maker’s new Alienware Legend Industrial Design, the monitor boasts a series of gentle but pronounced lines, which are contrasted sharply by the scarily thin, incredibly flat, near-bezel-free OLED panel, which at certain angles looks literally pressed to the monitor’s chassis.
Overall the build quality on this monitor is absolutely first rate, with everything about it showcasing an immaculate fit-and-finish and radiating a sense of dense, well-made quality. Classy just about sums it up.
But the reason this monitor costs so much isn’t primarily because of its future-industrial design; rather it’s that it comes with a simply stunning 4K OLED panel that boasts a wide colour gamut of 98.5% DCI-P3 (in layman’s terms, super strong, vivid and accurate colour reproduction), and “infinite contrast”. The latter means it features OLED’s signature pixel-by-pixel lighting and, as a result, an incredible contrast ratio (130,000:1 here). On that point, though, it is necessary to mention that the peak brightness on this monitor is 400 nits. Currently the top OLED TVs and HDR monitors on the market boast peak brightness ratings of around 1,000 nits, so if true HDR performance is a must then this monitor doesn’t quite tick that box.
At this price (and size) this is obviously not the gaming monitor that the vast majority of gamers are going to ring up. The 55-inch bulk means that only those who essentially need a gaming-focused TV-sized screen in their setup should apply. And even if you do need that, this monitor is about to be seriously challenged by a raft of new cheaper products like the recently announced LG CX OLED, which will offer the same sort of features like 120Hz refresh rates and Nvidia G-Sync, with better brightness.
But, the thing is, the 55 OLED actually delivers, at least in our opinion, the absolute best performance in its (admittedly rather niche right now) product class – it is truly top technology embedded in a premium design.