 Back in January, EVE said that their upcoming monitor, the EVE Spectrum, would be the world's first 240 Hertz, 1440p, one millisecond IPS display with 750 nits of brightness, as well as 135 watts of power delivery for your devices, all for a disruptive price. And well, this is the problem with kickstarting technology products, isn't it? Because what sounds space age today is commodity tomorrow. And here we are, 11 months later, having reviewed multiple 240 Hertz IPS monitors, including more than one that's 1440p resolution or higher. So then, is their sales pitch still compelling as we head into 2021 and can EVE overcome their tainted history to make the product a buy rather than a beware? We're gonna find out, brought to you by Ting. Ting is a customer-focused mobile provider that has new rates to help you save more on your monthly service plan. Learn more at the end of this video or at the link below. ["Skyward looks and feels pretty metal as the kids say, and presumably, it'll be a part of whichever monitor you decide to order. So there's the Spectrum QHD, so that's 1440p, that runs at 144 Hertz for 440 bucks, the Spectrum QHD 240 Hertz, and the Spectrum 4K 144 Hertz. That last one is the one we have, which is actually kind of unfortunate because I was a little more interested in the 240 Hertz QHD model. All of them are using LG IPS panels, and the QHDs seem to use the same panel as the LG 27GL850, while the 4K model probably uses the same panel as the LG 27GN950. That is their only 4K 144 Hertz. Of course, this is all according to what EVE says, and EVE does not have a spotless record for delivering exactly what they say when they say they're going to do it. Of course, that doesn't stop us from being curious about their progress on the Spectrum, which is why we've agreed to take a look at what is an early unit, to give us an idea of what the industrial design is gonna look like. According to EVE, this is something that we can count on, hopefully what the performance is going to be like for anyone who either backs or buys this monitor once it's just normally available. Okay, documentation time. What the devil? Yeah, they emailed saying this was out of date, so here's the real one. You've got a 10 gigabit per second uplink, that's the USB type C on the bottom. The two type A's are both 10 gigabit per second. The one type C on the side is also 10 gigabit per second, and finally the type B is just a regular upstream, five gigabit per second, according to the latest spec sheet. Power bricks in here, kind of a cool idea for the packaging. That's neat. Pretty beefy, but you would expect that from something that has to power not only itself, but I don't know, the numbers are all over the place, but at least a hundred watts of external device. Apparently HDMI 2.1 is not yet working in our early unit, so that's not something that we're going to try to do for now. Apparently it wants a DisplayPort connection, so we'll see how that goes. If this doesn't immediately work, we're throwing it in the garbage, just kidding, DisplayPort's a terrible connector and it could necessitate a reboot. That whole split down the middle thing on 4K monitors used to be a thing back when they were using two panel displays and DisplayPort multistream technology, but I thought this is supposed to be using DisplayStream compression to a single tile display, so I'm a little confused. Let's just double check and see if we even have the 4K one. Yes, we do. James! Did both sides of it look different when you hooked it up? So this is our second unit actually. The first one had a broken joystick, so we couldn't navigate the menu properly, which wouldn't have been a huge problem except that the up direction didn't work on the joystick and it was set to the minimum brightness out of the box, so we couldn't turn the brightness up. Now this one, you have got to be kidding me, only down and right work. I'm just gonna reboot. What? I think the menu is completely frozen. I think we just blue screened the monitor's on-screen display. I mean, not blue, strictly speaking. Whatever, you guys know what I'm talking about. I don't think I've ever seen this before. We just locked up a monitor firmware. Okay, so let's try this again. Oh my God. No, that's not what I wanted to do. I don't really know what to say at this point. Hold on a second. Did switching to HDR make the line go, is it there, but just less noticeable? No, I think it's gone. Fine, screw it. Let's game in HDR at 4K 144 Hertz. Okay, whoa, that's weird. Do you see that shadow down the middle now? Now there are a handful of issues that Eve was aware that we would find with this unit, like the housing tolerances are not yet final, the firmware is obviously early, the USB-C port does not charge devices correctly yet, but what they told us is that in terms of performance, this was supposed to be very close to what customers will eventually receive, at least in terms of color accuracy. They've still got some work to do with apparently the blur busters folks, which is somewhat promising to me, to get their motion blur reduction like really down pat, and they claim these monitors will be calibrated at the factory for Delta E's of less than two in P3 standard and at a D65 white point. Spoiler alert, if this is supposed to be a Delta E of less than two, we don't seem to be quite there yet. HDR performance is apparently something that they're still tweaking, and some good news is that I don't see that dark stain down the middle of the screen when we're out of the menu. Oh, you know what? It's got full screen dimming on right now. Wait, what just happened? It's supposed to be off. Okay, now just a sec. It's clearly on, right, Brandon? Like when I open the menu, the entire screen clearly gets brighter. Okay, so this, it's not supposed to have dimming enabled though. See, backlight dimming is supposed to be off. So it's just this broken menu. Yeah, strangely G-Sync doesn't show up at all. So it doesn't even allow me to force it. One other thing we can test is whether my laptop will charge. Right now they say the main problem is compatibility. So some devices should actually work even on this early unit for charging. Mine does not. This is the bottom one, right? Yeah, okay, whatever, you know what? What's the worst that can happen? Fry my laptop? PC isn't charging. Use the recommended charging cable and make sure it's directly plugged in. All right, fair enough. The correct way to evaluate a display using the BlurBusters UFO test is not with your eyes, but I've looked at it enough times that it gives me a rough idea to just look at it. And I can tell you guys now that there's no kind of blur reduction enabled whatsoever. Yeah, okay, okay, overdrive off. So let's try and see if that helps at all. Cause I just don't, I don't think any of this is doing anything. The plan today was to pull out the high speed camera and shoot 1000 FPS footage of this so that we could really evaluate its motion blur performance. Cause that's one of the things that's so great about the LG monitor that's based on this same panel. But this is so far off that there'd be no point even evaluating it. What are they shipping this thing? I mean, I don't know, but not soon. Moving on to color then, we know that this panel is capable of excellent performance, which means it comes down to calibration. Unfortunately, compared to the LG GN950, it's not even close in spite of Eve telling us that this unit was supposed to be pretty representative of the color accuracy of a finished model. Now it's better than the one that was locked at zero brightness, but I wouldn't use it for any kind of color accurate work. Whereas the LG out of the box was pretty darn close. So then here's our problem. Going back to the original sales pitch, everything looks great. And honestly, there's a lot here that's really promising. It's very compelling value if they actually deliver on all those selling points. But this is the issue with backing tech products on Kickstarter. Back when they announced this monitor, it seemed like unbelievable. And now the timeline has slipped. I mean, this project began in earnest in March 2019 to the point where there's competing products that you can already buy. And this is, if this actually shifts on their estimated date, which is February, 2021, I will be floored. Like this unit right here, there's a manufacturing date on the back, December, 2020. They just made this and it's just, it's not close. It's not close at all. But with that said, remember how I said you could sort of buy competing products? Let's talk about that. For high refresh rate IPS monitors, we've got the Acer Predator XG17 that runs at 240 Hertz and the Asus PG259Q, which actually runs at a whopping 360 Hertz. But those aren't really quite comparable because they only run at 1080p, whereas 1440p, which should theoretically be available at up to 240 Hertz with an Eve spectrum is much, much finer looking. Now, as for 1440p 240 Hertz, there is the Samsung Odyssey G7, but it maxes out at 600 nits peak brightness. It's sold out basically everywhere, though in theory you could get it for as little as $550 and it's curved, which not everyone is into. There's the Samsung Odyssey G9, that one's also 240 Hertz, 1440p, but is super wide, also curved and is a thousand dollars. Now, as for direct competitors for this guy right here, 4K 144 Hertz, well, LG already has the 27GN950. It's $800, has RGB on the back, which is cool, but it has no power delivery, no HDMI 2.1. So if you have a gaming PC and a next gen console, say in your dorm room or something like that, cause you're a baller student or whatever, and you wanna hook them both up to the same display, well, you'll get the best experience with something that does have HDMI 2.1 and it's sold out everywhere and is going for anywhere from $1,100 to $1,400 on eBay. Damn you scalpers. And finally, ASUS has announced an HDMI 2.1 43 inch monitor, but they are also not shipping that yet. So time could be more on Eve's side than we originally thought if they can deliver, which is kind of the biggest elephant in the room because Eve's got a bit of a history. The EV was a Windows 10 2-in-1 that compared very favorably to Microsoft Surface Pro while costing considerably less. Unfortunately, Eve Tech couldn't produce or fulfill enough orders to meet the demand and many backers received their devices months or even years after they placed their orders. It just kind of points to them not necessarily having a perfect track record when it comes to supply chain management and following through, which sort of raises the question. I see a lot of potential here, but the concern for me is that they were so eager to send me something that's not quite ready that it gives me concerns about the business side of things. Do they have enough funding to actually do the production runs or do they need more pre-orders, for example? And I have no way of answering that question for you. So if it actually lives up to the specs that they say it will have, looks pretty freaking sick to me, but it remains to be seen if it will. Just like it remains to be seen how I'm gonna segue to our sponsor. Thanks to Ting Mobile for sponsoring today's video. 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