 A few months ago, Samsung display gave us an early look at their unreleased quantum dot OLED TVs and gaming monitors. And we made a video telling you guys how blown away we were by the image quality, except there was one small problem. That video was sponsored. So many of you accused us of being overly enthusiastic. Well, guess what? This right here is the Alienware AW3423DW. It's 175 Hertz, it's got HDR, and it's equipped with a brand new quantum dot OLED panel from Samsung display. And because James was the one who did that last video, I get to experience this tech in the flesh for my very first time right in front of all of you. And today, there's no Samsung display sponsorship to be found because this video is sponsored by Bitdefender. Bitdefender total security is a complete solution to protect your windows, Mac OS, Android, and iOS devices. Try it out for free for 120 days on up to five devices at the link down below. There's no time to waste. So I'm all set up on this chair that we literally found in the alley. I'm at the new house, so there's no furniture here yet. And we are gonna game on this bad boy. What do we got for graphics horsepower here? We got 3090. A 3090, perfect. Oh, should we talk about specs at all? No, no, you just gotta game on it. All right, I'm gonna try it. I've been so excited to try these ever since James came back from the early sneak peak. The first thing I'm gonna do is change it from HDR 400 true black, which is what you'd see on a typical OLED to HDR peak 1000. That's right, theoretically, it has all the advantages of OLED, which means perfect blacks, but with 1000 nits peak brightness. We're gonna set the game to 3440 by 1440, which is the native resolution of this panel. But while we're in the menu, you guys probably noticed something. G-Sync is enabled and this isn't just regular G-Sync. This is G-Sync ultimate. So that means we can have HDR and G-Sync running at the same time. All the bells and whistles. Oh, I can already tell HDR is working even just in the menu. Here we go, here we go. This is not as glinty and HDRE as I would have expected. Yeah, just normally you'd see like really eye searing, like specular highlights on the car and stuff like that. It's just not bad. Okay, this shaded house with the lit sky behind it is like kind of a crazy amount of dynamic range here. Like my eyes need to adjust to look from one part of the scene to the other. That's insane. There's still a lot of detail in here. Like when I look up into the sky with the sun behind it, I'm like, oh, and then I look over here. It's funny. It really depends how the game is mastered in HDR. It seems like in Forza, they were really going for a more muted, but realistic HDR experience. It is crazy how photorealistic this game looks on an accurate display. This thing will do 99.3% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. And out of the factory, we measured just a Delta E of two in creator mode using Kelman. So that's accurate enough for pretty much professional work on a gaming display. Now we're in game mode right now, which is not creator mode because we wanna run it in HDR 1000, but I was surprised at how not overdone Samsung made their game mode. Usually Samsung is the king of just ridiculous vibrancy. This looks great. How sure are you that the game supports HDR? Microsoft hides HDR under screen calibration Okay. We can decide how HDR we're going here. Well, yeah, I think so. Yeah. Okay. This looks freaking awesome. Oh man. Love it. I mean, it won't make me good at video games, but boy does it ever look good. And wow, I do not see any discernible color shift. That is insane. It's more like looking at a picture almost. Like obviously it's self-emissive, right? Like it's illuminated, but you could forget you're looking at a monitor. Unreal. It just looks awesome. Like what else is there to say? Effects and explosions look awesome. Of course, we've seen super color accurate displays in the past that are totally unsuitable for gaming, but that is not the case here. One of the other big advantages of OLED is lightning fast pixel response times. And that's still true here. Samsung claims 0.1 milliseconds gray to gray. And I can't see any discernible motion blur, even when whipping the camera around. That's freaking awesome. Also, pixel response time is only part of the calculation. You also need to factor in how much input lag there is from the displays electronics. And we managed about 16 milliseconds from click to photon with our Nvidia LDAT, which is up there with the best gaming displays. It's so responsive. It's just, what are the compromises? What are the compromises? Find me one. That's why I wanted it off. Honestly, like the clarity feels almost strobing clear to me. Like as I'm panning around, there's just no blur. Now we should talk about Samsung's brightness claims for a little bit here. We did manage to hit their claimed 1000 nits of peak brightness in a one or 2% window, which doesn't sound like a lot, but in a scene like this, would you really have more than one or 2% of the screen that would actually be at peak brightness? You wouldn't even want to look at something that's at a thousand nits across the entire display. So it does fall off. You see about 800 nits peak brightness at 10%. And then once you make your way all the way to full screen, it sits in the neighborhood of 280 nits, which is a lot for this much of your field of view. It's very respectable compared to other devices out there. And when you factor in that it's got perfect blacks, the perceived dynamic range is extremely high. Man, look at this suit all glowing yellow and stuff. Ah! Jake, are you ordering one right now? Brother, look. Here, get your shield back. Where's your shield? Does it recharge? Yeah, there we go. There we go, watch this. Ah, it looks so good. Oh, it's so crisp. Okay, sorry, I'm supposed to try a different game now. Oh, this game looks so good. Like Forza had that realism kind of HDR effect, but this is like, whoa, fantasy environment HDR, you know? It's just different. It hits different. President Evil. All right, we're in a much darker scene now, but this is a really good opportunity to talk about one of the big benefits of QDL LED, which is much better representations of red and yellow, which are traditionally really difficult to handle. And you can, man, it's gonna be hard to capture this on camera through your monitor, but I tell you guys, the gold doesn't look yellow, like gold tends to look on a normal display. It looks gold. It looks shiny. That is, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. And I should shoot it apparently. Oh, that was so cool. The thing about HDR is it's not about just more FPS, right? Which is what we think about in terms of what makes something better for gaming. It's about increasing the immersiveness. And when a game is mastered well in HDR, it's just so much more realistic looking. This looks and feels like I'm standing in the room. I have actually, I have a confession to make, gamer confession. I have never played an RE game. Disappointed! Like your eyes need to adjust to perceive the difference. Oh, it doesn't let you jump up ladders. This is one of those games games. Something to note though, is that our RTX 3090 is working pretty freaking hard to make this look this good. We could even benefit from a 3090 Ti upgrade. Get subscribed by the way, cause we do have a review of that coming. Here we go. I missed one of them, shoot. Okay, are we close? Oh, shoot, that's not what I meant to. Oh, that's really close, isn't it? No, stop! Stop, I can't get rid of the menu. So we're in filmmaker mode on the LG TV. Yeah, you lose a ton of the detail here, but it's all there. To be clear, LG's OLEDs, this is a C1. Great viewing angles compared to anything that we had seen before, but this is next level. It doesn't matter where you are in the room. Man, when are the TVs with this coming? I definitely wanna see a TV with a proper filmmaker mode with this display tech. I feel like it could be even better. Okay, until now we've talked about some of the reasons. The AW3423DW looks so good, but I'm sure you guys want more depth. It starts with the QD OLED panel from Samsung display, which works very differently from a typical white OLED or W OLED panel by starting with blue light instead of white. Then they filter that blue light with inkjet printed quantum dots, hence the QD in QD OLED. We've got another video explaining this more in depth that you can check out here. But basically by starting with a high frequency wave like blue across the entire panel, and then stepping that light down into red, green, or anything in between through quantum dots, you lose very little light in contrast to the current W OLED method, which filters colors rather than converting them. And because there's no white sub pixel, colors don't get washed out when you're trying to make them look brighter. And because we're being more efficient and not losing light to color filters, we're also not driving the panel as hard. So the Alienware QD OLED here does have a manual and an automatic pixel or panel refresher option, but the tech has come so far that we're just not anywhere near as afraid of burn as we used to be. On top of that, Dell is so confident in Samsung's panels that they are offering a three year warranty that includes burn-in. Now we're still waiting for some official statements from Samsung about results from factory testing, but confidence is pretty high that you can finally leave up your UI during a marathon gaming session and not worry about it sticking around when it's time to watch a movie. As for the rest of the monitor, you can put it either on the stand or on a standard base amount, and it's got a two-tone white and black plastic case with RGB lighting on the back. There's lots of IO, including, this is really cool, two USB ports on the bottom, making them way easier to reach than most monitors, and there's a navigation nipple down there for the on-screen display, which has tons of handy options and is really easy to use. It's got decent cable management through the stand, and while the inner and outer bezel leaves a little bit to be desired, honestly, I immediately stopped noticing it as soon as there was content up on the screen. There's also an acceptable level of pants to have lentil with the included stand, meaning that Alienware might've just made almost every other ultra-wide 1440p monitor irrelevant, especially given the price. It's 1299 US, which is a lot of money, but right now, if you look for similar specs with an IPS panel rather than a QD OLED, you're not gonna find many at significantly cheaper prices. This 34-inch UltraGear from LG, 1250. There's a cheaper UltraGear, but it has way worse HDR, uses regular IPS instead of nano-IPS, and it's only G-Sync compatible, not G-Sync Ultimate, and that one's still $1,000. So you have to ask yourself, is QD OLED worth spending an extra 300 bucks? It's not gonna be in everyone's budget, but we think that if you're already in that kind of price range, the answer is most definitely yes, and we're gonna have this and these other displays linked down below so you can make your own decision later. Now, part of the reason the price is not in the several thousand dollars category is the ability to get so many panels of this size from one sheet of mother glass. That's the name for the giant slabs of glass that TVs and monitors are cut from. We don't know exactly what Samsung display is doing, but at 2.5 by 2.2 meters, you can fit 18 of this on a single sheet instead of trying to cut a few out of the leftover glass from larger displays like 75 inches TVs. Now, Samsung is reporting some low yields on this tech, as low as 30%, but since so many screens are being cut from a single sheet, one small defect doesn't necessarily mean that one sixth of your entire sheet is now garbage, and as time goes on and the yield rate increases, a nice thing about it being so low is that there's a lot of room for improvement, so the price should come down even further. Speaking of great prices, check out our new Team Red LTT store pillow, CPU pillow. That's fun. So it seems like an easy answer if you're shopping for a display. Good product, good price, all things considered. So this is what you buy, right? Well, yes, but also no. This is the first QDL LED gaming monitor on the market, and while it seems great, you're always taking a bit of a risk with new tech. There's also no real competition yet, and there are sure to be a plethora of QDL LED options in the not so distant future. You could see better prices or, I mean, who knows? Maybe you just don't really like the design of the stand or the housing that Alienware has given us here. So jumping in now, honestly, looks like a good buy to me, but there are bound to be more options to choose from if you have a bit of patience. As for me, my CX is two generations old at this point, so this is looking like a pretty good upgrade. All I need to do is make some money by telling you about our sponsor, privacy.com. Privacy lets you shop online with virtual credit cards that offer way more security and control than conventional cards. Like have you ever signed up for a free trial and forgotten about it only to find charges on your account for a subscription service you never really wanted? With privacy.com, you can create a new card just for that trial. All you do is designate the card to be single use and set the monthly spending limit to $1 so companies actually cannot charge you again, even if you forget. Privacy.com is PCI DSS compliant, uses sophisticated encryption to ensure that your information stays safe and they offer two factor authentication. And since they make money from merchants, there's no cost to you with their free tier. So sign up today and you'll get five bucks for free at privacy.com forward slash Linus. That's privacy.com forward slash Linus. If you guys liked this video, but you still aren't sure about QDL, you can check out the Samsung just made everything else obsolete video. It was sponsored by Samsung, but the title really does say it all guys. This is really cool display tech. No Samsung money in sight today.