LG 27UK600
LG enters the HDR fray
EVENTUALLY THE BRAVE new world of HDR will settle down into something we can all understand. For now, it’s a battle of standards that must surely leave the average screen buyer utterly baffled.
Enter LG’s latest HDR-capable panel, the 27UK600. On the one hand, it offers HDR 10 support and, with that, 99 percent of the sRGB color space. On the other, it’s good for peak brightness of 450 nits and doesn’t support local dimming. Granted, there is no definitive definition of where standard dynamic range displays end and HDR begins. But for an LCD monitor to be truly classified as HDR, we reckon it needs to be brighter than that and have a backlight with local dimming capability.
What else do you need to know about the new 27UK600? As the name implies, it’s a 27-inch model. It’s also a 4K screen, with an IPS panel type, a 3840x2160 native resolution, and support for AMD’s FreeSync adaptive refresh technology with a refresh rate of up to 75Hz, the latter two features only available with AMD graphics cards. Hooked up to Nvidia cards, it’s a conventional 60Hz panel.
What’s absent is USB-C connectivity. There’s DisplayPort and HDMI, but the flexibility of USB type-C, including the ability to charge a laptop and drive the display with a single cable, is missing.
So, what does LG’s latest look like when you fire it up? Pretty darn nice. It’s immediately obvious you’re looking at something a little beyond the SDR norm. The colors pop just that little bit more, but without the cheesy oversaturation you get with some VA screens. The accuracy of the IPS panel is obvious. The moderately slim bezel also makes for a fairly contemporary feel, although it’s not nearly tight enough to make pairing multiple examples of the 27UK600 resemble a single-display solution.
Subjective contrast performance is strong, too, and if anything exceeds the modest expectations that come with LG’s claims of 1,000:1 contrast capability from the IPS panel. 4K squeezed into a 27-inch panel also makes for a tight pixel pitch and nice font rendering, even if it’s not going to rival your phone for crisp fonts.
Where things get more complicated is with the screen’s HDR functionality. Enable HDR in Windows and play some HDR content, and the results are a mixed bag. The HDR content itself looks pretty good. Not as stellar as a display with local dimming, like the Acer X27, but a step up in terms of vividness over an otherwise comparable SDR panel. Less satisfactory is SDR content in HDR mode, including the Windows desktop and Windows apps.
Windows 10 now includes a so-called brightness slider to tweak the appearance of SDR content in HDR mode. With the Acer X27, the results are excellent. Not so with the LG 27UK600. Even at maximum brightness, SDR content is muddy and off-color. The net result is that you’ll have to jump back and forth between SDR and HDR modes. For the record, the 27UK600’s HDR Effect mode isn’t a winner, either. You’d never use it for general computing; it does strange things to the color balance. And while it does add some punch to video content, the results aren’t terribly natural or convincing.
All of which means that as an HDR panel, the 27UK600 comes up short. However, if you view it as a very capable SDR panel with a little HDR ability, it’s far more compelling. If it had USB-C connectivity, it would be even better. But as it is, it’s still worthy of our qualified recommendation. –JEREMY LAIRD