Gadgetory

welcome back to hard rom boxed yes that is a new intro video I'm sure you guys will let us know what you think of it in the comments below but for now I have got a massive pile of monitors at my place to test so it's finally time to get back into the swing of things and start reviewing some of these displays today we're starting with the most affordable of the pack the lg ultra gear 24 GL 600 ft a distorted gaming display it's 24 inches in size packs a 1080p resolution at 144 Hertz uses a TN LCD panel and includes free sync support so it's your typical entry of a high refresh display with that said it's probably a little on the expensive side for these specifications currently retailing for 230 dollars in the US and 300 bucks here in Australia so we'll have to see if this monitor does anything special to justify that price from a design perspective it's all very basic although in this price tear that's not necessarily a bad thing the construction is mostly plastic it's simple bezels aren't slim but there's also nothing crazy going on here in terms of gaming elements there's a few red highlights on the stand and on the rear to go along with the mostly matte black design but otherwise just a very straightforward uncontroversial build perhaps the only thing LG does drastically different from other monitor vendors is having the port's directly accessible on the back panel rather than facing towards the desk from beneath this makes it easier to plug in things but it's not as nice for cable management here you get one DisplayPort to HDMI ports and 3.5 millimeter audio output jack as far as the stand is concerned there's not much adjustability here which again is a typical trait for an entry-level monitor you're only getting tilt adjustment and because this is a 24 inch display tends to sit fairly low down on your desk height adjustability would be nice but that requires a more complex stand design which would increase the price you do get standard base and mounting options though if you want to add that in later one thing I am pleased to see is that the 24 GL 600 F uses a directional toggle for accessing the on screen options this is one of the few budget class monitors I've seen to include this most other monitors use horrible face buttons for the difficult to use LG has done the right thing here and as a result the collection of options are pretty easy to navigate what we're getting feature wise is nothing special LG's included the standard range of features you've probably also seen from its competitors I'm talking about cheap crosshairs a black frame insertion mode called one millisecond motion blur reduction there are some shadow boosting options and a typical range of color controls it's nice that some of the game specific options have a description to let you know what they do I think that's a pretty good inclusion in terms of panel again we're looking at a flat twenty three point six inch 1080p TN one of the reasons you might choose this sort of panel is its speed which I'll get to shortly all of the major downsides are the viewing angles this display doesn't have the worst viewing angles I've seen from a TN but all the usual problems are visible here such as contrast shifts at pretty much any angle except for dead-on this should be fine for gamers that use this display as their primary monitor particularly if you position it properly but as a second monitor of anything to do with content creation I probably not recommend it response times though is strong which is good news for gamers that want the clearest possible image this panel is rated for one millisecond response times and in my testing I found a greater great average of 3.42 milliseconds which is fairly typical for a one millisecond rated TN in general this makes the 24 G or 600 F about twice as fast as equivalent VA panels in this class so if you are concerned about smearing or ghosting this TN will provide a better experience in that regard for those wondering these results were recorded using the default fast response time setting as the faster mode introduced a noticeable overshoot fast is my recommendation here also important to note is that the refresh rate range II is 48 to 144 hurt so we are getting full low frame rate compensation with free sync and have previously verified this display to work perfectly within video cards as well as AMD cards the other factor the test here is input latency which again is very good at just a few milliseconds when you combine this with the fast response times and high refresh rate with adaptive sync we're getting a great combination of speed for gamers it may be a sub to $50 monitor but the gaming experience here is really good where this TN falls down and this is an unusual for a TN is in most areas of color performance as well as having weak viewing angle the 24 gr 600 F uses what I believe is just a 6 bit panel with 8-bit color achieved through FRC it's rare to find a native 8 bit TN panel and from looking at some quantization tests this does appear to be just 6 bit which will disappoint the color purists out there brightness is find at around 300 nits peak as is the contrast ratio which is better than average at 1100 to 1 this is roughly on par with LG's typical specifications and I think you'd be pretty unlucky to get a unit that's more around the minimum values they've listed default color performance is a bit of a tale of two worlds in terms of grayscale performance the 24 GL 600 F is respectable especially for an entry-level display I wouldn't call these results super accurate but a delta e average of just 2.2 for a neat gamma curve and a reasonably good white point are all better than average outcomes with this sort of panel however colour performance isn't as great while the white point is decent there's a bit of a twist to the saturation response especially at the maximum blue and red levels you can also see that the full red point doesn't reach the very tip of the srgb spectrum so overall this display can only cover 96% of srgb there isn't a horrible result these days you would expect 99% coverage from basically any monitor delta-e averages of 3.44 for saturation and 4.45 for color checker sure that calibration really wasn't much of a concern in the development of this display due to the slight rotation in saturation performance there's not much you can do in the on-screen controls to improve accuracy with some displays the white point can dictate accuracy so correcting that can translate every other point into its correct accurate position however the default white point for this display is good while there's no option to adjust the hue so your only option to improve accuracy is a full calibration I did this using display Cal and you can download the profiler created from our patreon page if you are a member the profile won't be fully accurate for your unit due to panel variances but it should improve the situation compared to how this monitor ships out of the box as is the case with most calibrations the results here are very accurate it can't fix the blue and red primaries so we're still not getting full srgb coverage but other than that a decent outcome and one that only causes a slight drop in contrast ratio to about ten fifty to one the final performance metric to look at is uniformity the 24 G or 600 F is pretty good here often with entry level displays you'll end up with poor uniformity but at least for the main central zone this panel holds up well the outer edges start to see some shift away from the center but overall I think this is an above-average result for a budget monitor overall the LG 24 GL 600 F is a typical entry level gaming monitor these is a TN panel which gives it fast response times and a great refresh rate which LG has then combined with free sync a low input lag to deliver a pretty neat gaming experience however it falls behind in most color metrics such as viewing angles which are typically poor for a TN and color gamut which fails to cover the entire srgb spectrum it's also not well calibrated out of the box but this isn't unusual for a budget gaming focus display so it's not a huge deal to me the big issues are those viewing angles and the gamut and this once again leaves buyers in a toss-up between TN and an equivalent VA since both are available for roughly the same price these days you have a choice between a flat and fast TN with wit color performance and a slower curve VA with superior colors and a better contrast ratio the sort of things you want out of a monitor will dictate which technology is better suited to your needs although I tend to find VA s at this price to deliver a better overall package aside from pure panel performance the 24 GL 600 F doesn't do anything special but it's also not bad in any category the design is fine the stand is limited but that's also the case with most other budget monitors the port selection is typical and the on screen features match other brands again this is really your classic budget display experience because this monitor doesn't stand out of the pack in any notable ways I think it's probably a bit too expensive in the end it's quite common to find TN displays with the same specs around the 180 to 200 US dollar mark such as the acer xf a 240 which makes the 24 gr 600 F about 30 to 50 dollars too expensive to get an instant recommendation then you have VA options like the vo-tech GN 24 C for one hundred and ninety dollars or in other countries where the vo-tech isn't available something like the AOC C 24 j1 again a lower-cost the 24 GL 600 F isn't a bad product so if you can find it on sale or it just is a good price in your region then yeah go ahead and grab one it's just not priced competitively right now which makes it hard to recommend over some of the other monitors I've been talking about I expect the price will filter down a bit over the next few months so it could be one to keep an eye on that's it for this review if you're interested in any of the monitors I've been talking about in this video there are links to check their current prices in the description below subscribe for more monitor content because I still have a ton of interesting new products to get through I think it's maybe five or six more 100s to get through I consider supporting us on patreon to gain access to some cool exclusive perks and I'll catch you in the next one