We've been looking forward to checking this glossy OLED gaming monitor for a while. Good news: We will finally see the Dough Black Spectrum's fancy new monitor on store shelves next month.
The Spectrum Black is a 27-inch 1440p glass OLED gaming monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate with a .03ms response time. It's got two HDMI 2.1 ports, DisplayPort, and a USB Type-C port with 100W power delivery.
The feature that makes this monitor stand out from some other popular 1440p OLEDs we've gotten our hands on recently is that the OLED panel comes with a cover glass. Dough claims the glass increases the "ambient contrast ratio by 40%" and reduces "reflections by 70%". According to Dough, the 'Black' in Spectrum Black is to showcase "the perfect contrast offered by its OLED panel equipped with cover glass."
This should make the Spectrum Black a good choice if you're constantly fighting a glare in your gaming space.
So on top of the benefits you already get with an OLED display, such as low response times, deep blacks, and stellar picture quality, the bonus of the glossy panels will make this display really tough to resist. It's why we've already fallen in love with the Alienware 34 and Philips Evnia. It's becoming tough to recommend non-glossy OLED gaming monitors for those reasons.
All of this is crammed between a super-thin bezel similar to the Eve Spectrum 4K's design we checked out a few years ago. It's subtle for gaming monitors meaning there's no RGB, oversized logos, or funny-looking stands.
It uses an LG panel, so we would like to see if it has the same brightness issues we saw in our review of the LG UltraGear 27GR95WE, which pretty much has the same specs as the Spectrum Black. According to its spec sheet, it's got a peak brightness of 1000cd/m2, but we will have to see for ourselves.
The Dough Spectrum Black will be available in July for $1099. However, pre-ordering the monitor by June 15 on Dough's website means you can pick up the monitor for $899 (plus $99 for a stand) with a built-in VESA mount.
There's a cheaper version of the monitor that comes with a matte coating for the OLED panel instead of its glass variant for the pre-order price of $699 (plus $99 for the stand), but don't worry, the specs on the Spectrum Black with matte coating are the same.
