iiyama G-Master GOB2701QSC Review (£299 Tandem WOLED)

1. Introduction2. Design3. On-screen Display (OSD)4. Panel Analysis: SDR5. Panel Analysis: HDR6. Response Times & Motion Clarity7. Input Latency8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

We mentioned at the start of this review that the G-Master GOB2701QSC is iiyama's first OLED monitor, and after testing it for the last week, I think you can tell.

That's not to say it's bad by any means – it delivers the core OLED experience, with infinite contrast, effectively instant response times and very impressive motion clarity. Factory calibration is also pretty good, excluding the slightly wonky gamma – but as we explained, that is inherent to the panel technology, rather than anything iiyama have done themselves. Even the HDR performance is solid, hitting 1440 nits in our testing, and with strong EOTF tracking.

What I mean, then, is that throughout testing we simply encountered a number of quirks and oddities that you wouldn't expect from a company that's been making OLED monitors for years. To list just a few, it's things like the fact you have to manually toggle HDR in the OSD, even when HDR is enabled in Windows. Or it's the lack of a uniform brightness mode, so you are stuck with brightness dimming as window size increases, due to ABL behaviour. That's not to mention the poor sRGB mode, current lack of clarity around firmware updates, or the fact that there's just the default HDR mode – with no choice of different options.

At the full £420 MSRP, I think it'd be hard to look past those sorts of things. None of them are dealbreakers taken on their own, but considering Gigabyte's MO27Q28G can be found for under £440, I'd pay the extra £20 or so any day of the week.

But what makes the GOB2701QSC so interesting – for now, at least – is the fact it's currently retailing for just £299, and will do until 27 September. At that price, it's far and away the cheapest Tandem WOLED on the market and it becomes much easier to forgive its flaws. After all, it still does a lot of things right and offers all the inherent benefits of OLED technology. Long-term, I just think iiyama either needs to have a lower price-point, or start cranking out the firmware updates to fully flesh-out the package, as they're some ways behind their rivals in that regard.

You can buy the GOB2701QSC for £299 on Scan HERE.

Pros

• Very wide gamut.
• Effectively infinite contrast ratio.
• Very fast response times.
• 1440p at 280Hz is not impossible to drive in a lot of titles.
• Games just look so good.
• Factory calibration is very good, barring the loss of shadow detail for darker shades.
• Much brighter than QD-OLEDs and previous-gen WOLED thanks to the 4th Gen panel.
• HDR hits almost 1500 nits and is reasonably accurate.
• 2x HDMI 2.1.
• Very tempting at the £299 sale price.

Cons

• HDR has to be manually enabled in the OSD. Every. Single. Time.
• Just one HDR mode, there's no way to customise the HDR experience.
• We don't currently know how future firmware updates will work.
• sRGB mode is poor.
• No uniform brightness mode.
• Other rivals aren't much more expensive compared to the regular £420 MSRP.

KitGuru says: The GOB2701QSC is worth thinking about while the £299 promo lasts. You will have to navigate some quirks which are a little annoying, but the underlying panel technology itself is very impressive.

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