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Alienware AW5520QF 55-Inch OLED Gaming Monitor Review: Better Than a TV
Many have ditched computer monitors in favor of large-screen TVs when it comes to gaming. With today’s immersive titles, there’s no screen that’s too big. Gaming on a TV has a few drawbacks, though. Nearly all of them top out at a 60Hz refresh rate and don’t have G-Sync or FreeSync for fighting screen tears, and input lag is often too high to compete with the best gaming monitors.
The 55-inch Alienware AW5520QF answers the call with a large display, FreeSync and one more huge thing: an OLED panel. Nowhere else can you find an OLED monitor with gaming-ready specs, like the AW5520QF’s 120Hz refresh rate, FreeSync and RGB. Best of all, it has panel response fast enough to completely eradicate motion blur, and input lag is low too. But with a few things missing, you may reconsider before spending a mind-blowing $4,000--or even the sale price at the time of publication of $2,850--for this display over other, less expensive 4K gaming monitors.
Alienware AW5520QF Specs
Until LG managed to bring OLED panels to the mass market, the technology was something found only in lab prototypes. Note, OLED stands for organic light emitting diode, with the emphasis on light-emitting. As a self-emissive technology, OLED has the ability to address the brightness of each individual pixel from its peak output to complete black. LG uses the catchphrase “infinite black” to describe it, and the term is accurate. OLED manages better blacks than the best plasmas (plasma is dead, long live plasma) for a contrast effect that is well beyond anything LCD can deliver. And that goes for zone-dimming panels too. Even the Asus ProArt PA32UCX mini-LED monitor with its 1,152-zone backlight can’t match the black levels seen in a rank and file OLED monitor. While the AW5520QF’s peak brightness (130 nits for standard content, 400 nits for HDR) is nowhere near that of a premium LCD display, its black levels will quickly make you forget that. The image quality here is beyond stunning.
At $4,000, it’s strictly a premium product, but it has capabilities shared by no other computer monitor or TV.
Are large-screen gaming monitors worth clamoring over? On one hand, the proliferation of large-screen TVs into the gaming world is real. More players are turning to 4K TVs and away from desktop computer monitors. There’s just no substitute for square inches. But when you do this, you give up fast refresh rates, low input lag and adaptive sync.
The AW5520QF has one thing over every computer display we’ve reviewed: image quality. Its contrast and color are far better than any LCD panel available. But these things are not without cost, and we don’t mean the dollar sign.
The most obvious issue is brightness. Where the top HDR-enabled LCDs are hitting 1,000 nits or more, the AW5520QF manages just 400 nits. The only way to get its best image quality, you’ll need to use it in a darker room. There’s also the question of gaming technology. While it delivers great motion processing and low input lag from its 120Hz refresh rate, it doesn’t support FreeSync 2. That isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, but it really should be included in a $4,000 monitor.
