Image: Dough

Knead a high-refresh-rate gaming monitor with the deep colors and incredible response time of OLED? Dough is rising to the occasion. Today, itโ€™s announcing the Dough Spectrum OLED, a 27-inch screen that attempts to beat LG at its very own game.

You see, today โ€” December 12th โ€” is the day that LG is opening preorders for its new $999 LG UltraGear 27GR95QE-B, a 27-inch OLED monitor at 240Hz and 2560 x 1440 resolution shipping this January. But Dough is promising to put the very same LG panel into a glossy monitor with more desirable features โ€” as long as youโ€™re willing to wait until July and trust a company with a spotty track record.

Where LGโ€™s monitor only offers a pair of unspecified HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, and a two-port USB 3.0 hub under its matte finish screen, Dough is upping the ante with HDMI 2.1 with variable refresh rate (VRR) and auto low latency mode (ALLM) to natively support game consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X, plus a one-cable USB-C charging, data, and video solution for your laptop. The Spectrum OLED will offer 100W USB-PD charging, DisplayPort 1.4, and a decent 10Gbps USB 3.1 connection over that single USB-C cord.

Happy to see so much USB-C

Plus, Dough says its monitor will have a built-in KVM switch thatโ€™ll let you route your mouse and keyboard to a second computer as well โ€” you can point two USB-A ports and two USB-C ports, all at 10Gbps speeds, to either of two USB-C connected computers you plug into the monitor. Doughโ€™s promising a dedicated KVM switch button and both split-screen and picture-in-picture modes.

That all sounds amazing, particularly for the companyโ€™s $649 / โ‚ฌ749 starting price โ€” but here are a few reasons Iโ€™m not putting my own money down.

First, you should know this isnโ€™t just a glossy screen, which is an intriguing proposition by itself; it might be a rather dim screen, too. Whether youโ€™re buying this panel from LG, Dough, or Asus โ€” yes, Asus may soon have a version as well โ€” itโ€™s rated for a typical brightness of just 150 nits, which isnโ€™t typically sufficient in a brightly lit room. While OLED screens donโ€™t typically get all that bright, 150 nits is dim even for them: 150 nits is roughly how bright a 65-inch LG OLED TV gets when itโ€™s been severely artificially dimmed by LGโ€™s own software to prevent burn-in.

That said, it sounds like youโ€™ll have some ability to tweak. Dough CEO Konstantinos Karatsevidis tells me the company โ€œwill offer settings to unlock max brightness of the panel for a short time (gaming session) and then go back to presets.โ€ Specifically, youโ€™ll be able to turn it up to 400 nits using the monitorโ€™s on-screen display, and Iโ€™m eager to see what that looks like in practice. And, Dough says itโ€™ll offer a two-year burn-in warranty, which could give you peace of mind while youโ€™re doing that tweaking โ€” even if two years really isnโ€™t enough time to notice burn-in on most modern OLED panels. (It took four years for my LG TV.)

Second, while Dough is advertising a number of certifications, including VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400, you should know that nothingโ€™s been certified yet โ€” itโ€™s currently a prototype. โ€œWe are almost done producing our tooling as well as first motherboard samples. We can already light up our monitor in our final shell, but now itโ€™s time for certifications and debugging,โ€ says Karatsevidis. Dough isnโ€™t even showing us the back of the monitor yet.

Third, it doesnโ€™t come with a monitor stand; itโ€™s an extra $99. You do get a built-in 100 x 100 VESA mounting spot, though, so thatโ€™s money in your pocket if youโ€™ve already got a VESA monitor arm.

Buy now and save a lot of dough, I guess!

Lastly, thereโ€™s the companyโ€™s track record: Dough, nee Eve, has been good about building high-quality products for reviewers but less good about shipping them to customers. Karatsevidis says a July 2023 window gives the company more time to deliver.

Dough is counting on a certain amount of FOMO to get you in the door regardless of your hesitations, and the chief tactic is this: it increases the prices of its products quite a bit before they hit shelves. The early-bird, crowdfunding-esque $649 / โ‚ฌ749 price will increase to $1,099 / โ‚ฌ1,199 by the time it hits Amazon and co. Hereโ€™s the image from the companyโ€™s slide deck where it explains that logic:

Is this enough to convince you? Iโ€™m genuinely super curious, so please drop a note in the comments below, and hopefully weโ€™ll be able to bring you an early hands-on or even a review before the price jumps too much. I solemnly swear to include WAY more Dough puns.

Again, this wonโ€™t be the last monitor with this 27-inch 240Hz QHD OLED panel โ€” if the upcoming Asus is half as intriguing as this one, weโ€™ll be sure to let you know. We expect a whole bunch of awesome new monitors at CES as well, like these giant curved OLED screens from LG and MSI and an 8K ultrawide from Samsung.

Correction, 11:40am ET: Dough says the stand, not the monitor, has the cast aluminum alloy frame.

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