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Monoprice Dark Matter 27" 1440p QHD Monitor -- REVIEW
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Jun 22, 2024
If you're looking for more screen real estate to improve your workflow, schoolwork, or just have another monitor ready for the most challenging gaming imagery, you'll want to check out the Monoprice "Dark Matter" 27-inch 1440p QHD 165Hz Display Monitor. With its 2ms response time and big, bright display, there's a lot to appreciate. As tech expert Dave Taylor highlights, however, you will want to add an external speaker! Check it out at: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=44632 Visit Dave's Q&A Web site at: https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ #monoprice #darkmatter #qhd #gamingdisplay #gamingmonitor #2kmonitor #1440p #askdavetaylor
View Video Transcript
0:00
It's a big and fast display at a remarkable price
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Let's check it out. Dave Taylor here, and I'm checking out this
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This is the Monoprice, Dark Matter, 27-inch 1440P Q-HD, 165 Hertz monitor
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Now, that's a lot of jargon, a lot of buzzwords. Let's walk through it
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So 27 inch diagonal, as you can see, it's a big, bright, beautiful screen
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Really very nice. And its resolution is 1560 by 1440P, typically known as quad HD or QHD
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Some people refer to this as 2K. It's not technically 2K, but it is better than HD resolution, and it's a big crisp picture
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And that's a really important thing here. Now, it is an IPS panel, so it actually gives you over one
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billion colors that it can display. I guarantee your eyes cannot tell the nuance
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between one billion different colors, but it gives you lots of colors
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300 nits brightness at a thousand to one contrast ratio and the refresh
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rate's pretty sweet. It goes from 50 to 60 hertz all the way up to 165
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Hertz. Why is that important? Because the faster the refresh rate, the faster the
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response time, and this is two milliseconds response time, the more it can keep up with really fast action
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So if you've ever watched a movie or played a video game and it's like stepped through the frames
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as opposed to a smooth motion, that's because your refresh rate's not fast enough
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This display has no problem with that. It's going to give you the crispest
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cleanest and smoothest possible image on even the greatest action sequences or even when there's like lots and lots and lots of things going on
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And since it's just an HTML image, or display port in, you can plug it into really any gaming system too
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I have a plugged into a PC for one of my quick demos, but you could plug it into a PlayStation, an Xbox
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you plug your switch into it, whatever you want, and it's gonna work really well
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Now, speaking to which, let me go ahead and I'm gonna just play this
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Now, I'm actually pushing the sound through the single, little tiny speaker on the monitor
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And just to set expectations, it's not a very good one. speaker and it's certainly not a very loud speaker I would say this is an
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emergency speaker you can use or if all you need is a beep because you typed in
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the wrong thing or something then it'll work for that but for anything else
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you're probably gonna want to get an actual speaker but let's give this a shot your cases are designed to work with max and I will just say this is
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maximum volume it just doesn't get very loud And let see let just go back here And there really no way around it My YouTube channel might have lots of great information hopefully and you should subscribe
3:13
But it's not very exciting. So let's switch to something else. And by something else, what I mean is I plugged in an Amazon 4K fire stick into this
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essentially making this a smart TV. And all I have to do to switch it is to go here on the bottom
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There are five buttons. And you can see in this close-up. the buttons and none of them have any labels or anything. So you just have to sort of figure it out
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But the button, one from the rightmost, the right most button here is power. But if you go in one
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then you push and you get a menu and there's two versions of the menu. There's one for settings
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like this. And then they have the sort of shortcut menu. And for that, I can then go and change my
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input to HDMI 1. So it has two Hdemi, 2. inputs and one display point one point four input you can see those in this close
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up but I'm gonna go ahead and choose hdmi one whoops I guess I didn't let's try
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that again and I have to admit I am not at all a fan of these sort of menu
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systems but the good news is that you find that you don't actually need to use
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them very often so this should get us to our Amazon firestick and it should be working
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What's happening here? Looks like it's turned off. Let's turn it back on
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Let's see what happens. No, got a little technical difficulty. Let me just do what you do when you have technical difficulty
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which is unplug and then re-plug a device in. Let's see if that fixes the problem
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Well, what's happening here? So now we're back on HATMI2. So these demos, it's always fun to try to get things to work when you're on camera
5:06
Let's go back to H.D.I.1. And, aha, this is looking considerably more promising
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So the fire stick, really slick little device, I've actually reviewed it before here on my channel, comes in with a remote
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It is in 4K. It is super inexpensive. I think it ran about 30 bucks for me to buy this
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And let's see, it's still booting up. But once it does, it should give us, oh, there we go
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So now we got all sorts of interesting things going on. And as you can see, this really is a really nice little smart TV
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This would work great in a dorm room, in a bedroom. You could have it in your office
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And then when no one's around, you can switch it into TV. And then just like use your fire stick or your Roku or whatever it is
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and you can just be rocking a sporting event or a favorite movie or something while you're working
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I admit I often do exactly that. And of course you can also use it as a second display on your computer Mac PC Chromebook Linux machine So you could do it that way too So there lots of ways you can do this Now let see
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I told you it's an up to 165 hertz refresh rate, two millisecond response time
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Let me tell you, it's also a 178 degree viewing angle, which is really great
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because that means that you can have people standing near you. You can have it where you're not looking directly at it, but you're looking at an angle
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and that's true up down as well as left right so it gives you a lot of flexibility but let's see if I can choose
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something that will give us a little bit more interesting a demo let's see where are we it's a little
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tricky to do this sideways let's see if we can jump into this movie and hopefully it will give us
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some action sequences but of course realize that I'm going to mute this
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Realize that the, you know, refresh speed you see is also a function of my video camera and then of your playback system
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So the two milliseconds you're not going to really see demonstrated. And unfortunately, this film looks like it's very talky at this point
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There's not much action going on, so we'll bail. But most importantly
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I think you can see it's a really great addition to your setup
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whether you're going to use this as another display for your PC or your Mac
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whether you're going to plug in your gaming system, or whether you're going to use it as a TV using some sort of an input device
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Again, it's just a monitor. It doesn't include any smart TV software, nor is it intended to, nor is it priced to
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Now, what else could I tell you? On the back, it has a 100 millimeter by 100 millimeter visa mount
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So if you really want to, you can wall mount this display, which gives you some nice options
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And it adjusts the angle so you can adjust your tilt, but it doesn't adjust height
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That's important to know. And I will also note that when I opened the box, I had to build the stand, which is just a matter of putting a single screw in
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And it comes with a really funky screwdriver. I found that it wasn't as tight as I wanted
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So I added a washer. You could pick one up at a hardware store for about a nickel if you really want to do that
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And then it got super tight. My guess is that by the time Monoprice watches this video, they'll say, oh, let's just put a washer in the box
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So that might just automatically be part of the new dot one release of this piece of hardware
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But if you have one and you're finding that it's just a tiny bit more wobbly than you like, a nickel will solve the problem
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Really easy. Now, I showed you that has the 2, HDMI 2.0 inputs, one display port, 1.4 input
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It has that one, 2 watt speaker, it's tiny. Notice on this close of the input ports and such there also a 3 millimeter output jack You can use it for headphones but you could also plug in a speaker and then game changer You go and get one
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of those super inexpensive little computer soundbars that you would just put underneath the monitor
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plug it into the 3.5 millimeter on the display, and you have a completely different experience
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before really a remarkably inexpensive investment. Now, Dimensions, wise 7.1 inches by 24.3 inches by 17.7 inches. It is somewhat hefty at 13.7 pounds. It is not intended to be a portable
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display, so I don't think that's really an issue. And otherwise, it's really everything I have
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for you. It does include a display port cable. That's important. But it doesn't include an
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HDMI cable. So you're on BYOC in terms of cables. And that's everything. This is a
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great addition to my desk. I got a bunch of monitors and I really like to just have lots of
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stuff spread out so I can reference things. You know what I'm talking about. And then sometimes in
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the game, I might want to have a game where it stretches across multiple screens too. This is a
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great addition to that setup. It's everything I got. We need to talk about the price. But before we
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get to the price, I'm going to invite you to subscribe to my channel. Go ahead and click or tap on
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subscribe button. Give me a thumbs up if this was useful. Don't be shy to leave a comment
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I always appreciate comments, even if you criticize and say you wish I would have done this or shown this
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Great stuff. Thank you. Now, this. Got to take a breath through this one
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This is the Monoprice, Dark Matter, 27-inch, 1440P, QHD, 165 Hertz monitor
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And it's 199-99-currently discounted down to 159-99. at monoprice.com. I'll tell you for $199, this is a good deal. But for $159, this is a wicked good deal
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This is a great addition to anyone's setup. This can absolutely be your primary monitor
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You can imagine if you're a student, this is a game changer. If you're a gamer, this is going to be a
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great primary or secondary screen. And if you just want to have a little TV set up somewhere in your
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house or in your apartment or in your RV, then just add a little road
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or Amazon stick into the back and you are rocking and rolling and you can plug in your
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computer at any time and use that as a display too so really really nice setup and as for me
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I'm gonna go back to that movie and see if I can get to some of the action sequences
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because they look really good so that's all I got I'll hope to catch you in my next video
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