It’s absolutely no secret that LG has dominated the OLED space over the last half a decade or so in the TV space.
Without many OLED gaming monitor options, gamers opted to use the 55″ OLED TV as a monitor before LG released the 48″ and subsequent 42″ iterations, but they’ve now taken it one step further, releasing a 48″ OLED gaming monitor in its UltraGear line.
When talking pure visuals, you’d be hard pressed to tell the 48″ UltraGear OLED gaming monitor from the 48″ C2 OLED TV, but this is really the greatest compliment that I can give this monitor from a display point of view. The blacks are still incredibly inky, colours are vibrant and with HDR10, you can expect similar levels of brightness in HDR.
The two main differences between the 48GQ900-B UltraGear Monitor and LG’s C2 TV is the fact that the monitor has a matte, anti-glare screen, which some people might have an issue with and also the fact that unlike Samsung’s latest drop of monitors, there is no smart TV functionality out of the box, so you won’t be able to use it as a makeshift TV if you’re using it in a bedroom.
There’s a couple of other features that are totally unique to the UltraGear 48″ monitor. First is the inclusion of an UltraGear Remote, which if I’m being honest, looks like something out of the 70s in terms of size, but it’s actually quite useful. Instead of reaching around and fiddling with buttons/a finicky knob on the monitor, you can use the remote to change things such as input, volume, change between game modes and such. It’s a really welcomed addition.
The other is what you’d expect to see in a gaming monitor, in the fact that there’s some serious RGBs on the chunkier bottom portion of the side profile. This can be customised between static colours or the usual RGB profiles.
When it comes to inputs, there’s 1 x HDMI 2.1 port and 2 HDMI 2.0 ports, as well as a Display Port and some USB up and down ports. With the PS5 connected, I was able to take advantage of 4K at 120Hz seamlessly, and it looked absolutely gorgeous.
The monitor has speakers which is really useful for those that might not have external speakers on their desk, and they’re really quite good too. I was getting a good amount of bass coming through whilst taking down infected in Resident Evil 4.
Whilst there are familiar features from LG’s OLED TV such as Game Bar which is still really useful here to quickly check that frame rate and VRR are enabled, there are more features that you’d expect to see in a gaming monitor such as an FPS counter, crosshair, and a black stabiliser, so if you’re wanting more of those settings that are more often on monitors, you should lean towards this over the 48″ C2. It also has NVIDIA G-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium. You’re getting an 120Hz refresh rate (which can be overclocked to 138Hz) as well as a 0.1ms response time too.
I assume that a lot of people will be wondering whether to go for the 48″ C2 or 48″ 48GQ900 monitor, and that’s a hard one to answer, but I think the simple answer would be to go for whatever is cheaper. If you’re after a display that also acts as a TV, I feel like the C2 is the more obvious choice, but if you’re after more traditional monitor features, then this might be the way to go.
Regardless though, it’s just another way to buy what is one of the best displays both for general moving/tv show watching and also gaming, so you can’t go wrong either way.