At a Glance: Alienware 55 OLED Gaming Monitor

With its rich blacks and high level of contrast between colors, OLED displays are slowly taking over. They haven’t made much progress in the gaming monitor market as of yet, but Alienware aims to change that with the ultra-luxe 55 OLED Gaming Monitor ($3,999.99), a beautiful display with a stunning picture — and a couple of serious issues befitting early adopter technology.

Design

In true Alienware fashion, the 55 OLED comes with plenty of extra flair to help it stand out. In particular, the back of the display has an RGB LED light strip across its back and an RGB LED Alienware logo. These lights can be controlled via Alienware’s AlienFX software, and although they are behind the display, the glow coming from the LEDs will help this display shine aesthetically — and literally. The display is also extremely thin, at just 5mm thick (aside from the back portion, which tops out at 3.1 inches).

Moving on to the display’s core features, the large 55-inch OLED panel has a native resolution of 3,840×2,160 and a 120Hz refresh rate with HDR support — the first OLED panel to achieve that refresh rate. The display also supports FreeSync to smooth image refresh, and it has exceedingly small bezels.

Alienware’s 55 OLED display’s specs indicate that the monitor has a max brightness of 400 Nits with support for 98.5 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. Our sister site PCMag tested one of these displays and found it to fall short on both of these marks. DCI-P3 coverage topped out at 96.5 percent, whereas brightness maxed out at a lowly 285 nits. These results are disappointing, but as this is primarily designed as a gaming display, it’s not necessarily a critical blow.

Let’s Watch It Burn!

As OLEDs are known to have a propensity to encounter image burn-in faster than competing display technology, PCMag also made an effort to test how serious of an issue this is for the Alienware 55 OLED. The display was set with a static image of the Windows 10 desktop for a solid 10 hours. After this, part of the display showed clear signs of having the image burned into the panel. PCMag was able to resolve this issue by using a couple of utilities that Alienware includes with the display, but it remains a very real concern when using a display of this nature.

Conclusion

All things considered, Alienware’s 55 OLED features an excellent feature set and picture, and quite frankly I’d love to have one for my own office/gaming room. That said, the display is unfortunately set with a $3,999.99 price tag, which makes it not a realistic option for most people. Given how many other high-end, feature-rich displays you could buy together for the price of this one screen, I can’t really recommend it.

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