 240 Hertz monitors like this one didn't even exist just a few short years ago, but now there's a ton of them on the market, including for the first time ever, ones that feature IPS panels rather than the conventional TN. So today we're gonna see if Linus and a couple of other hardcore gamers around here can tell the difference between the eSports gold standard, a cheaper alternative and two IPS type newcomers and how their opinions stack up against more objective measures. Right after this message from our sponsor, SmartDeploy. SmartDeploy allows IT departments to reimage unlimited computer models from one golden image. Search their library for your models and grab your exclusive offer at smartdeploy.com slash Linus. It is amazing how different the colors can look from one display where presumably they're all after the same result and another. This is kind of trippy actually. Whoa! I'm gonna start with viewing angles. You know, TNs have gotten a lot better. From the side, this is definitely a TN, but viewing angles are actually not bad. Even from top down, like if I was standing behind someone gaming at their chair, like that's fine. It's not till you get low and look up at it, you go, oh yeah, there's the color inversion that's TN panel. So at home, I have the Zowie 2546 240 Hertz monitor and I love it. If I was anywhere but staring directly straight at it, it's a piece of garbage. I can't tell if it's just the coating that's hurting this one. The darker colors are just kind of disappearing and kind of approaching a mid gray. Kind of feel like as a gamer, I don't really care about viewing angles too much. I'm gonna be playing a game hardcore on this, right? So I'm gonna be sent off. Again, no contest. Number two is clearly the TN panel. I'm gonna be very disappointed if this is like mine. I'm gonna give worst viewing angles to this one, mostly because it's just so dim in the first place. I don't think it actually shifts that much more compared to this one, but this is a lot brighter, a lot easier to look at. I'm pretty impressed with three and four. I think they have pretty exceptional viewing angles where like the quality of the color and the light isn't drastically changing the further over I get. That's not a TN panel. And that's not a TN panel. To my eyes, monitor number three here, even though it has the best colors facing it dead on, has a greater color shift and a greater brightness reduction compared to our other non-TN panel here. So I rated that one number two for viewing angles. I'm gonna choose four as my first, three as my second, then one and then two. Best color reproduction I feel is kind of obvious. I hope it's obvious. Number four just seems truer to life, which is a bit weird because it's a game, but if life were a game, I imagine it would look more like that. I like the more natural look, but that might just be the choice of color temperature on number three. Four looks a little over-warm to me. So I'm gonna rank the colors one, three, four, two. Best color reproduction has gotta be number three. One thing that you can see on both of the TN panels, though, is the sleeves and the gloves are both green on this one. They're both yellow on this one. And then we look at one of the IPSs and lo and behold, they're supposed to be green and brown. Oops. There's just something about number two that makes it look really cheap. If life were a game, I feel like I'm a bit blind. I have cataracts. You can really tell on the green in the barrel. This one is just like, has blue in it as well. This just seems like grayish with a tinge of green. The third one is definitely calibrated to a colder temperature than the one on the right. The one on the right, I find the green looks a bit better, but it's close. Brightness and dynamic range. I'm gonna have to go somewhere where I have both shadows and highlights in view. This one definitely loses some detail down here in the shadows compared to our TN. The problem, though, is that some of these gaming monitors go out of their way, actually, to boost detail in the shadows, so that's not necessarily a strong indication of their dynamic range. What I can do that's not dependent on that, however, is look at black portions of the mini-map compared to the brightest areas of the scene. Hard. Counter-Strike is designed to not really have really dark areas so that it's more competitive. There's no areas you can go and just hide. So it's not immediately apparent which one has crazier dynamic range. I feel like number four is doing a little bit better job resolving the detail inside of this window. I can see that a little bit more, whereas here it just kinda looks dark. So I'm gonna give the edge to four on this one, then three, and then two. Deepest blacks, but dimmest display. It's a lot of points off of that. This surprises me, but I think this TN is actually better than that IPS in terms of the difference between the brightest brights and the darkest darks. Range, I'm giving it to number four. The reason I bought a 240 hertz monitor is not for color, not for brightness. It's for information getting inside my eye holes. I mean, even when I was gaming with a 120 hertz monitor, never felt like the input lag was what I was missing. It was the clarity. Kinda feel like lowest motion blur and lowest input lag. Kind of too similar for me to tell. I don't know. They're all so close. If I had to guess, I'd say one, one, like both tied and maybe these two are a little bit behind, but it wouldn't be by much. You know, one thing that might make this a little easier, is this cheating? This one somehow feels more responsive. I'm surprised. I thought I wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe it's just as bigger, so it feels like things are moving faster. Wow, I can't believe I didn't even notice too. I was so busy just completely focusing on like what the pixels looked like. I missed that these two are 27 inches and these two are 24 inch displays. I felt three was faster or something. It might just be some motion smoothing or some kind of interpolation that, I don't know what it was, but I'm gonna give it the edge. It's not my job to explain these things. It's everyone else's. And now lowest motion blur. I don't know if it's just the brightness being so different, but that one feels smoother. I'm gonna have to rank this one, that one, and then this one so far. So three, one, two for lowest motion blur. For motion blur, number three is definitely the worst, but it surprises me how close my one IPS over here is to my two TNs over here. This first one's so much more contrasty that I feel like because of the high contrast, I'm able to kind of tell the information even in motion a little bit better. And so I don't know if it's actually clear, if it just has the perception of being clearer thanks to its higher contrast, but I think I'm gonna give the edge to the first one. I'm gonna go in order, one, two, three, four, so. Which monitor would I buy? That is a really hard one for me to choose. I feel like performance-wise, like in game, I would be better off with number one, maybe number two, but number four, number four just looks a lot better in almost every aspect. The bigger, the color is better. It's still pretty fast feeling, but ugh. I feel like if I wanna win at games again, I kinda wanna go with number one. I take number three. It keeps more detail in the actual concentric circles that exist in this little mini-map here compared to this one, and it doesn't lose any of the highlights. It's got more true-to-life looking colors right out of the box, but its motion blur is not the best, but I'm not the most competitive gamer, so that's why I would take this one. Bigger looks better. If the colors on this one weren't so bad, I would give it number two, but it's gonna sit in three. I'm gonna give two to the other IPS display. I do like the size, size matters to me, and number four is gonna be this one. My overall preference is definitely the first one. It's the brightest, it's got the best color. The viewing angles weren't great, but as someone who's playing shooters competitively online, I don't need someone to be able to see from far angles. I'm looking straight on. I prefer 24 inches. For competitive gaming, you wanna be right up in there, and 27's actually a little bit big. Most competitive shooters use 24-inch monitors as preference. I'm gonna price them by my preference. I'm gonna say the two 27-inchers are 500 and 550, and I'm gonna say I like this one better. I think that's the more premium one. And then these two, this is easily a better gaming experience. It's just so much brighter. I'm gonna go 400, 345. Final answer. Pencil's down. I'd be surprised if the 27-inch ones were cheaper than the 24-inch ones. So I guess might as well start at the highest ones. I would price the third monitor at 550. I think this is probably the cheapest, and then this one a bit more than number two. Yeah, that one's the most expensive. This one? That one's the cheapest. What? This one? This one? This one? This one. I guess I'm just surprised that this is more expensive because it's a TN panel. How much is it? 550. Sometimes 500. It's also the oldest one. Oh, this is a cascading domino effect of wrongness now. The Zowie is this one. Oh, yay! I bought the right monitor. Yay! I'm not an idiot. Well, you're kind of an idiot. I'm happy. I thought I was gonna be revealed to be a moron, and I kind of am, but to the level that I thought I was. Even though I got the pricing wrong based on what has the most value to me, I can definitely see the value of this one for a certain type of customer. And now that I know the difference between these is 100 rather than $50, it becomes a much less clear cut decision, even though I still do give the nod to this one, both empirically and in terms of my overall feel. And we're back. Okay, so the guys didn't exactly agree on everything, but there were some common trends. Basically everyone agreed that the TN panels had the least motion blur and input delay, with the LG coming in third. To validate their experiences, we set up a Pursuit camera, which helps visualize motion blur, but with the element of human perception taken out of the equation. You can see that the ASUS and the BenQ are way more clear. Just look at the alien's eyes and the white dots on the ship. However, both of these monitors are using backlight strobing to get that result. Here's what the ASUS looks like with ELMB turned off. While the LG apparently doesn't have such a feature at all. The participants also generally agreed that the IPS panels, the LG and the Acer, had superior viewing angles, color accuracy and brightness. Although the BenQ did pretty well here too, according to David. And again, our tests, this time with Kalman color checker agreed, except the BenQ is actually the least accurate. Sorry, David. Which basically gives us two competing recommendations, depending on you and your priorities. If you're buying a 240 Hertz monitor purely for motion performance, just to click heads, then the BenQ Zowie XL2546 is still the reigning champ. But if you also use your monitor for watching videos and movies or playing sightseeing games, then the bigger, more color accurate IPS models are more well-rounded. But then there's price. At 20% cheaper than the BenQ or the Acer, the LG really starts to emerge as kind of a no brainer. Unless of course, you're strapped for cash and you're really impressed by the ASUS's full range ELMB for another $55 off. Wow. It sure is a great time to be a high refresh rate gamer. And it's a great time to check out the Drop Control keyboard, featured heavily in our recent blind key switch challenge video. It's got a solid CNC aluminum frame, built in switch plate, RGB lighting and QMK firmware for customizability. It has hot swappable key switches and comes with Cherry MX, Kailh or Halo switches. And it weighs in at a pretty hefty 964 grams. Buy it today at drop.com. Ah, and you can buy a hoodie like this at lttstore.com. Ha ha ha. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, get subscribed and hit us up in the comments with all those comment things you'd like to say, including suggestions for products that you wanna see us cover in the future. And if you're looking for something to watch right now, how about the investigation we did on whether or not 240 Hertz actually matters compared to 144, 60 Hertz. We did an awesome collaboration with Shroud and other pro gamers. So check it out right here in the middle of the screen, wherever it's, I don't know, over here. Bye bye.