Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box today I'm looking at a monitor from a brand I've never used before but one that a lot of you guys have been requesting biotech they're super popular on Amazon and make some of the cheapest gaming monitors you can get so I've always been interested to see how they stack up and whether it's worth buying this sort of monitor over a more name-brand option the monitor I have to review today is the biotech G n 32 LD finally a relatively simple name for a monitor this freesync display tis 31.5 inches in size and packs a curved 1440p va LCD the tops out at a 144 Hertz refresh rate it's priced at four hundred and seventy dollars through Amazon which is around the mark of some other budget brands like pic Co and MSI but have monitors based on the same panel but it's a lot cheaper than say the a soos ROG Strix x3 32 vq or the samsung c 32 HD 70 for example when testing out more budget oriented monitors are always wary of a couple of things is the build quality any good and is the display defective in any way to address that second point first my retail monitor ship with no issues whatsoever so no dead pixels or anything like that and in fact vo-tech actually offers a full replacement if your monitor arrives with the dead pixel so it's really not something to be concerned about as for build quality the GN 32 LD is fine it's not particularly amazing and I certainly wouldn't class it as a high-end construction but it's fine for a gaming monitor the base of the three prong stand is metal but otherwise the stands pillar and the rest of the monitor use a greyish plastic with a few red highlights the plastic used on the pillar feels particularly cheap as it uses a really basic finish though it's a bit better on the rear of the display itself overall vo-tech is using a gamer design here which I tend not to prefer there's a lot of strange angles and vents that probably could have done with that there's also two RGB LED strips on the rear which add nothing to the decide I mean you're not even able to see them during standard operation in there RGB support is basic plus the RGB actually clashes with the red highlights so overall it's a bit of a strange choice the stand is sturdy and does support both height and tilt adjustment although height adjust is quite limited there's no swivel support not that swiveling is that important and there's also no cable management hole which again not that important and a bit of a nitpick my biggest issue with the design is the OSD controls biotech has gone with four buttons along the bottom edge of the panel which makes navigating through the OSD a pain compared to a directional toggle all monitors really should be using a directional toggle with menus of this complexity no exceptions however the OSD itself includes a lot of features you'd also find on monitors from other brands so you're not missing out on much going with the cheaper biotech option the OSD includes things like a low blue light mode crosshairs for cheating a super resolution feature and even picture-in-picture along with the usual image controls the array of inputs on the g and 32 LD is basic DVI HDMI and DisplayPort plus an audio output jack the monitor supports free sync with low framerate compensation so you get adaptive sync across the entire refresh range up to 144 Hertz and I still think the combination of resolution and refresh rate the GM 32 LD provides it's a 2560 by 1440 monitor after all is perfect for gamers with reasonably high in hardware gives that great mix of smoothness and Clarry the Samsung VA panel used here is curved with an 1800 hour curvature I'm or a flat panel kind of guy with 16:9 monitors but at 32 inches in size the curve isn't that bad plus right now there aren't many options for monitors of this size and specs that aren't curved so you're pretty much stuck with it anyway let's talk a bit more about the panel and see how our test data matches up to via text claims for brightness they lose 218 tips of typical brightness and I measured a peak of 365 nits which is going to be too bright for most desktop users the contrast ratio does fall a little shorter biotechs claims though at a touch under 2500 to one compared to its rated 3000 to one value although as this is a VA panel we're still getting that nice high contrast ratio is also good to see this contrast ratio held throughout the brightness range new to our test suite is response time testing one of the most heavily requested metrics we've bought some of the fastest tools available to test response time and got about testing some of these monos we've had on hand and over time as we do more monitor reviews we will get our largest set of data forms sweet comparisons but the good news is we can now provide this key metric that tells us a lot about how the model affairs in smearing ghosting and how suitable it is for gaming so vaio tech they claim a three millisecond greater gray response time using overdrive but in my testing using the high response time setting and that's the highest setting available and the optimal setting for this modeler I recorded just an 8.2 millisecond greater great average response which is quite slow but within a normal range for VA panels as we know VA is one of the slower LCD technologies and that's on show in this result it might also be useful to know that on average rise times were significantly longer than fall times almost double across our test points and mid gray transitions for example 20% white to 80% white a particularly sluggish I also recorded a 15 point one millisecond black to white to black transition time which shows you the time required to make the largest luminance transition in case you're wondering the important thing to note here is that both the average gray degrade response and rise times in general actually took longer than the refresh window this is a 144 Hertz monitor so the frame is updated every six point nine four milliseconds except this panel only is able to transition in on average 8.2 milliseconds this means that in some cases you might not be getting a true 144 Hertz refresh because the crystals themselves simply can't transition fast enough to show a completely new image at that rate while you don't get any noticeable overshoot smearing and ghosting are concerns due to the long response time however this isn't an issue specifically with this vo-tech monitor rather all monitors that use the same Samsung VA panel will have roughly their same response times equal to what I've shown here so don't think that you're getting a faster display if you buy the MSI or a seuss monitors instead they still use the same panel so they're faced with the same inherent limitations of the VA technology as we've i/o takes three millisecond response time claimed not exactly accurate to say the least the good news is the GM 32 LD exhibits excellent input lag of just a few milliseconds so while transitions aren't especially fast the monitor processes its inputs quickly and gets on with the job and yes we also have the ability to test input lag now as well which we've normally the tools were using to give an estimate of the displays processing time and unlike some lag testing tools out there our custom solution works at the displays native resolution and refresh rate before I get into color testing let's look at uniformity after all this is a curve display where uniformity is often an issue while results here aren't amazing and most flat panels will produce a noticeably more even image the GN 32l D is on par with other curve displays in this metric the edges of the display are inaccurate relative to the center giving a slight vignette style appearance but I'm yet to use a curve monitor where this isn't an issue testing the monitors straight out of the box it's quite clear that vo-tech has spent very little time calibrating the display to any sort of color standard Delta e values across our standard color accuracy tests exceed 4.0 from the factory and the color temperature is a surprisingly warm 5890 4k on average below what is required on top of that the 2.2 gamma mode the panel is set to by default does not produce 2.2 gamma but 2.0 gamma and colors in general are left unchecked so the monitor is more saturated than it should be while displaying srgb imagery the good news is the monitor is quite calibrated if that's a word and you can make several key Corrections just through the on-screen display using these settings here I was able to correct the gamma issue bizarrely the gamma 2.4 setting gives a correct 2.2 value and tighten up the color temperature which improves the grayscale delta-e average to below 2.0 one of the better results i've seen just by adjusting OSD settings saturation and color checker results improve as well like with most monitors you're not going to get the best results unless you perform a full calibration the good news is a fully calibrated G + 32 LD is very accurate with Delta YZ below 1.0 indicating the monitor is well suited to color accurate work achieving this level of calibration only resulted in a small hit - brightness and contrast ratio and this VA panel has a lot of headroom in those departments of course I don't think many professionals would want to use a curved display for content creation and the uniformity issues prevent the panel from being superb in terms of color accuracy but if you want your gian 32 LD to be accurate it is only a short calibration run away and for those of you who are supporters of hardware and box through our patreon page you can download the calibrated display profile created for the vo-tech Jian 32 LD over on our page links to that in the description below while not every monitor is created equally at the factory if you use my OSD settings in conjunction with my profile you should be able to get near the results I've shown here without any specialized tools so going into this review I was mostly interested to see whether the vo-tech G + 32 LD could deliver the same sort of experience and performance as more popular monitor brands for less money and I think in general the answer is a resounding yes that probably shouldn't come as a surprise considering the GN 32 LD uses the same panels other monitors with the same specifications but it's good to know that this doesn't appear to be a low-quality binning of the panel or anything like that it's defect free and it performs exactly as I expected for this panel type so if you were thinking about buying an equivalent monitor from a sous Borna save a decent amount of cash the GaN 32 LD is a great option that said there are some areas where vo-tech has cut costs to keep the price down the build quality is fine but it's basic and in some areas pretty cheap the panel can be calibrated to a good level of accuracy but no real effort has been made to tighten up color performance at the factory and for a product that you'd hope to last many years our one-year warranty is shorter than some other OEMs provide however all that considered I'd still recommend the biotech G + 32 LD and it's $470 asking price depending on the retailer that's around the cheapest you'll pay for a monitor with these specs give or take a few dollars and when you're getting a viewing experience as good as a more expensive brand I don't see a lot of point opting for a price here equivalent I'd also suggest you look at the vo-tech G + 32 Q as well which uses the same panel and is even cheaper although it does use a rather unique gold design which might be off-putting for some bias but I expect that monitor to perform pretty much exactly the same as the June 32 LD and I think it might be getting phased out for the newer model that's it for this first review of a vo-tech monitor hopefully the guys of biotech will send out a few more monitors in the future because I know how much do you guys love cheap monitors consider supporting us on patreon to get access to display calibration profiles and our exclusive discord chat I'll catch you in the next one