 Tired of getting teabagged, disappointed by dim HDR-nt? Well, Microsoft wants you to have one less excuse for being terrible. With a design for Xbox display, theoretically, you can trust your TV to deliver exceptional response times, breathtaking visuals, and even immersive sound. But is this program all it's cracked up to be? To find out, I've got three of them lined up right here. And you see this little sticker right there? Look at that, cute little Xbox sticker. Spoiler alert, in spite of that being there, at least one of these is absolute trash. What's never trashed though, is my segues to sponsors like CableMod. Thanks to CableMod for sponsoring today's video. CableMod's new keyboard cable configurator is the easy way to complete your keyboard look. You can customize almost anything and receive your handmade cable in two weeks or less. Check them out at the link in the video description. This is not the first time a console maker has taken a crack at making or certifying a TV. Nintendo and Sharp teamed up to make a TV in the eighties with a built-in NES. Sony made the terrible, but at least interesting, PlayStation 3D TV that allowed two people to game simultaneously for some reason. Okay, that thing was cool, you're wrong, objectively wrong. And there's also the more boring, but more practical PlayStation TV. But what we've got here is less like those and more like a certification program, which makes me think of things like the VESA display HDR standards or the Blurbuster seal of approval. And the basic premise of the Design for Xbox display program is pretty sound. Microsoft's basic pitch is that finding a TV that delivers a great gaming experience is a bit of a pain in the butt. And honestly, I agree with them. It's easier than ever to show up at Costco, grab whatever TV looks decent for the price and end up with a very solid TV that kind of sucks for gaming. You might get misled by its 120 Hertz capabilities that rely on motion smoothing, or find out that the picture is good because of a bunch of image processing that adds 50 to a hundred milliseconds of delay, essentially making every game feel like Jello no matter how many FPS your fancy new Xbox Series X is putting out. So here's what you have to have to meet the Design for Xbox display program. You must support HDMI 2.1, HDR, 4K at 120 Hertz and variable refresh rate. Now, most of this is really good. In fact, the fact that consoles now support 120 Hertz and variable refresh rates will legitimately make your gaming experience feel smoother. But I do wish that Microsoft had gone a bit further, specifically with the HDR requirements. More on that later. Let's start by taking a look at our first monitor here, the Phillips Momentum 559 M19YV. Wow, what a mouthful, but I already kind of love it because look at this matte screen. Oh, how often do you see that these days? That's freaking awesome. And there's a lot more to like here. It's got a VA panel with 95% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. So that's 125% of sRGB. It's display HDR 1000 certified with a peak brightness of 1200 nits. They claim a 4,000 to one contrast ratio with a Delta E of less than two. And it has Phillips's cool ambiglow feature, which makes it so that the wall behind it, and you won't see that because we actually went and put our own light back here, but the wall behind it will kind of match what is being displayed on the screen. I'm sorry, did I see in the notes that the sound bar is like Bowers and Wilkins collaborated or something? Really? Huh, it actually sounds not bad. I mean, Bowers and Wilkins, it's like, I wouldn't describe it as value from my experience, but damn Daniel. Oops. Ah, shortcut. I definitely feel the slow pixel response times of the VA panel. You do? You don't? No. David, back me up here. Well, I mean, like I measured it. What do you think the pixel response is on this? I would say somewhere in the neighborhood of like eight milliseconds. 5.2 is what I measured. Well, they're both bad. I mean, depending on pricing, okay? Like if we're coming in way cheaper than something like an OLED, and if my installation is gonna be in a brightly lit room, I might be willing to make that trade off, right? Or if all I do is game and I'm really concerned about things like my HUD getting burned in. Okay, right, you've got my attention, but it's noticeable. Maybe open up Halo. All right. Forza is notorious for motion blur. Okay, that's fair, that's fair. Maybe some of it is just Forza being a smearing mess. You know what, you're right. The smearing is not nearly as bad. Wow, he died. The smearing is much, much better. It's definitely still there, especially if you compare to something like an OLED, but it's absolutely usable. This gives us an interesting opportunity to have a look at its full array local dimming performance. It's only got 48 zones, which basically means that under normal circumstances, when you're looking at bright content like this, it probably won't be that noticeable. But if you've got black bars, yeah, you can really see, it's not really black. It's more like a glow. I mean, to be clear, it's not the same kind of glow you get from like an IPS glow, but if you're in a dark room, you'll notice it. Yeah, so the price of this is $1,600, which is pretty much exactly the same as an LG C10. That's 55 inches. That's a bit of a problem. Yeah. It's funny to me, given how hard Microsoft worked to support Dolby Vision on the Xbox series, that it's not part of the requirements, but I can also kind of see why, because my understanding is it's quite a lot harder for TV manufacturers to implement, and they wanted to be able to have as many partner devices as they can. With that in mind, let's move on to one of the other partner devices, shall we? Next up, we've got the RG Strix XG43UQ. This one's 4K 144 hertz, though it is limited to 120 on the Xbox. Also a VA panel, 1000 nitpick brightness, only 90% coverage of DCI-P3, but they claim a Delta E of less than one, and we actually measured 1.05, which isn't what they claimed, but is still really impressive. It's edge lit, which means that we're probably not gonna see the same kind of contrast. That's a very unusual thing for an HDR display, meaning I guess we better fire up a game here and see if it actually manages to look very HDR. My expectations are extremely low. I think I've already figured out which one's the poo-poo one, Alex. Yeah. Did I do that? Try out the remote. Okay. Try out the remote. You know, I think- Wow, what? What? It worked. It's never worked for me. Oh, really? Oh, well, it's- Oh, now it's not. It's not doing anything else. Oh my God, I already see it, Alex. This display has a bit of an unusual sub-pixel arrangement, so instead of RGB, it's BGR. And among other things, it can make text look kind of weird, but I actually noticed it just on the edges of objects. Yeah, we can inspect it further later, but that is what I have in there. Clear Type, you can make text better in Windows, but for games, browsers, video, it just looks bad. Interesting. If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably worse than the other one. What'd you measure? So they claim one millisecond response time, and that's one millisecond moving picture response time. Okay, so that's like hacky, cheaty response time. It's actually 6.9 milliseconds. 6.9 milliseconds. Okay, all right. Which is fine for a VA panel, but if you're comparing it to something like an OLED, you're not really there. The thing is though, you can't buy an OLED at this size, so if you want something smaller, you're gonna be stuck with something not OLED. Yeah, you can even see it here. David, do you see that? How the leading edge of this text is blue and the trailing edge is orange? It's there. My eye can definitely, most definitely see it. Bottom line is the color accuracy is great, but at a price of 1300 US dollars, you shouldn't buy this. You should spend the extra couple of bucks for one of these or an LG C10 or C1. All right, let's find out how damn cool Acer's XV 282K is. Oh, Linus, Linus. Wait, what? We need to science this. We need to show people why this sucks so bad. Oh, we do? Okay. Yeah. I wanna just put it on the floor. I brought a microscope in here. You did? Yeah, look at this. All right, fine. One option to show you this would have been a macro lens, but we wanted to go more hardcore than that with a really, really, really macro lens. Got the microscope. Okay, you ready? Are we gonna be able to? Okay, here we go. Oh, oh, geez, boy. Wow, that was, that was really close. Yeah, basically that's what I was talking about before. It's all bluey on one side and orangey on the other side. Really, it's only when you're looking at something white on a different background, which makes sense because that's when all three sub pixels are gonna be going full bore. Let's move on. This is our first IPS panel of the bunch. It's 4K, 144 Hertz as well. Again, 120 Hertz on Xbox. 10-bit color, only 400 nit peak brightness, AKA HDR-rent. And the only difference from the non-Xbox version appears to be that it has a green accent here rather than a red one. They boast a Delta E of less than one. We measured 1.3, which isn't less than one, but is still excellent. And it's got an iSafe panel, which means it's approved by TUV? TUV? TUV, yeah, sure. Basically means less blue light emission and it's supposedly better for your eyes. Now, one thing I'm not really sure what to expect from it is smeariness. I wonder if I just have a preference for IPS panels because honestly, it feels less smeary to me than those VAs, even though I can see that you said it actually has the worst response times out of the three. Yeah, I also didn't have a problem with this one at all. And the other ones I didn't really like. Weird. Yeah, it's like measurably worse, but. And yet here we are. Yeah, it's just way better to use. It goes to show you that the actual science of benchmarking something like response times is incredibly complicated and one measurement can't tell you the entire story because the user experience of this one is miles better. Missed opportunity, by the way, Alex. LTT store desk pad. It's not here. You're a console gamer. That's okay. You can get a t-shirt, lttstore.com. The HDR experience is basically not HDR. It's taking in an HDR signal, but at $900, my expectations are that you're gonna need to have some kind of, whether it's per zone or per pixel dimming in order to get that high dynamic range, right? It's not just about that it's not bright enough. It's about when you're in a forest like this and the sun is shining through the trees and illuminating the leaves and glinting off the trunks, you're not getting that effect. There's no impact from it. To be clear, it's not bad. My biggest problem with this display is that it's being marketed as an Xbox gaming display. Like it has other cool features. It has a built-in KVM. So if you're a developer, let's say, who also games, it's 4K, high refresh rate. You can have your two machines, both hooked up to it simultaneously and quickly switch between them. That's super cool. I don't know if it's $900 super cool to you, but the fact that it's HDR support is so bad means that if I don't get a value out of those additional features and the color accuracy for that matter, I just don't really see it. So bottom line, what does the Xbox certified sticker mean? Kind of not much. Especially because we found better Xbox gaming TVs and monitors that do not have the certification. Yeah, that's like a good monitor and a bad gaming display. It's kind of rough. Just like the segue to our sponsor. Squarespace, we use it, no joke. We actually use it. Both our linusmediagroup.com and ltxexpo.com websites were built quickly using Squarespace. They are so easy to maintain that even Colton can do it. If you haven't heard of Squarespace before, it's an all-in-one platform that makes it easy to get your website up and running quickly. If you have a home business, you definitely need ones and you can even sell things through your Squarespace site. 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