Dough Spectrum Black 27 review

It feels weird when you've got a shiny new gaming screen sitting on your desktop, with all the rich OLED-ness we've been wanting from our monitors, to find yourself pining for the old-school IPS screen it's just displaced. But that's where I am with the new Dough Spectrum Black screen. 

If you were to just casually glance over the specs of Dough's long-planned OLED monitor you'd maybe be forgiven for wondering just what my issue is. It is, after all, a 27-inch 1440p OLED panel with a 240 Hz refresh rate, a response time so low you might as well just say it's effectively instant, and it all comes under a lovely glossy Gorilla Glass cover.

What's not to like, as my dear ol' dad is wont to say? A surprising amount, actually. Mostly because I don't think any 27-inch 1440p display should ever be priced over $1,100. That would be the case even if it was the best example of a 1440p panel I'd ever seen, but with the pricing and the additional drawbacks of OLED as a monitor technology, that makes this far from the sweet spot of gaming monitor perfection.

Yes, you can pick it up for less if you opt for the cheaper matte coating, or if you already have an existing monitor arm and can eschew the need for the $99 stand which doesn't come as standard and otherwise bumps the price up to $1,200. But that's still a lot to spend on a mid-res display when you can buy subjectively superior 4K IPS screens for less. From the same company should you so desire.

Screen size: 27-inch
Native resolution: 2560 x 1440
Panel technology: LG W-OLED
Coating: Gorilla Glass DXC or Matte
Brightness: 150 cd/m² typical
                      450 cd/m² peak
                     1,000 cd/m² peak (HDR)
Refresh rate: 240 Hz
Response time: 0.03 ms (GtG)
Inputs: 2x HDMI 2.1a, 1x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x USB Type-C DisplayPort, 1x USB Type-C upstream connection
Output: 2x USB Type-C 3.1 Gen2, 2x USB Type-A 3.1 Gen2, 1x 3.5mm audio
Price: $1,100 (Gorilla Glass) | $899 (Matte) | With stand + $99

Before plugging it in I