When comparing LG 38UC99-W vs BenQ ZOWIE XL2411, the Slant community recommends BenQ ZOWIE XL2411 for most people. In the question“What are the best monitors?” BenQ ZOWIE XL2411 is ranked 12th while LG 38UC99-W is ranked 29th. The most important reason people chose BenQ ZOWIE XL2411 is:
The most in-depth settings of the monitor are usually just 5-10 clicks away.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Excellent general purpose monitor
Impressive amount of on-screen real estate, excellent picture quality, exceptional connectivity, and great color accuracy puts the LG 38UC99-W above nearly all competitors in the market.
Pro Supports 85W charging over USB-C
You can charge your laptop and have display output through a single cable thanks to the monitor's USB-C port.
Pro Features On-Screen controls
You can access all the general features of this monitor using your mouse and a keyboard thanks to the LG’s On-Screen Control software.
Additionally, the On-Screen Control offers many screen split presets.
Pro Perfect for multi-tasking
Having enough display real-estate to fit three vertically aligned Google Docs windows comfortably, the LG 38UC99-W is an excellent tool to boost up the productivity in everyday office duties, CAD/CAM applications, and many other fields.
Pro Excellent for watching movies
Acing the near-cinematic aspect ratio of 21:9, the LG 38UC99-W is an excellent companion to watch movies because you won't see the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen when watching most movies.
Pro Has a pair of good speakers
The LG 38UC99-W features a built-in 20 Watt stereo speaker system which sounds fairly well compared to the 4-10 W speakers the competitors at this price point offer.
Pro Exceptional connectivity
This monitor beats most of its premium competitors in terms of connectivity because it features a USB-C downstream port which has multiple parallel functions. First, you can use it to access the monitor's onboard USB hub. Second, it can be used for charging a USB type C compliant laptop. Finally, you can use it to receive video and audio signal from a computer.
Additionally, the LG 38UC99-W has two HDMI ports, a DisplayPort, and an inbuilt Bluetooth module.
Pro Supports dual linkup
You can connect this monitor to two computers so that each machine use half of the on-screen area. This might come in handy for those who frequently use a stationary desktop computer and a laptop.
Pro Great picture quality
Only the best monitors can match the LG 38UC99-W's contrast ratio, peak brightness, gamma, and color accuracy, as the monitor features one of the finest IPS panels in the industry.
The LG 38UC99-W displays beautiful pictures, with deep and rich blacks, vibrant and accurate colors, and good-looking intermediate tones. Despite the fact that the monitor's native contrast ratio is only 1000:1, the dark scenes look deep and intense as the backlight of the 38UC99-W can drop below the brightness level of 0.15 nits, which only the best monitors can do. Colors pop and look vivid, as the 38UC99-W can sustain its brightness above the 300 nits mark. The mid-tones look lifelike thanks to the monitor's near perfect gamma value, which is only 1.3% off from the ideal value.
Moreover, the monitor's color inaccuracies can't be seen by the human eye because it only has an average color error dE of 2.12.
Pro Intuitive OSD
The most in-depth settings of the monitor are usually just 5-10 clicks away.
Pro Flicker-free
The backlight of this monitor does not cause flickering. Instead of using the conventional PWM backlight dimming technique, this monitor dims its backlight by the aid of DC voltage, which eliminates the unwanted effect of flickering. Monitor flickering is one of the primary sources of fatigue and eye strain and should be taken very seriously, especially by those who spend a lot of time in front of a monitor.
Pro Can fight glare
The panel of the ZOWIE XL241 has enough brightness to fight glare, making it an excellent monitor for bright rooms.
Pro High refresh rate
You'll receive faster picture updates than your rivals who play on slower panels because of the monitor's native refresh rate of 144 Hz, which is among the highest in this price range.
The monitor's native refresh rate tells how much frames its panel can show each second while working at the native resolution. The faster is the panel, the more frames it can process and display.
Pro Well-handled motion
The ZOWIE XL2411 can reproduce clear motion, free of artificial motion blur and ghosting effects as each pixel of the monitor can change its color within only one millisecond. It is on par with what the best monitors in this price range offer.
Note that the overdrive feature is used to achieve such fast pixel response. In some cases, pixel overdrive makes the pixels overshoot their target values which causes artificial effects. Nonetheless, this can be avoided by not setting the overdrive setting to its maximum.
Pro Lag-free
This monitor offers a responsive and lag-free gaming experience because of its fantastically low input lag of only 3.2 ms. In terms of input lag, the XL2411 outperforms every single competitor in its price range.
The monitor's input lag corresponds to the delay between a video card producing a frame and the frame being processed by a monitor. Lowe input lag means controls feel more responsive onscreen when gaming.
Pro Good picture quality
When it comes to picture quality, the BenQ ZOWIE XL2411 does have a lot to offer as the monitor's contrast ratio, peak brightness, and color accuracy are on par with what the best gaming monitors in this price range offer.
This gaming monitor can display eye-catching dark and bright scenes, full of luminous, and accurate colors. Dark scenes look good because of the monitor's native contrast ratio of 1090:1, which is high enough to make blacks appear truly deep. Bright scenes look genuinely luminous because of the monitor's high peak brightness of 350 nits, which combined with the panel's excellent color accuracy reproduce vivid and life-like colors.
Pro Good for gaming
The BenQ ZOWIE XL2411 has enough juice to be one of the best gaming monitors in its price range. It combines low input lag, fast pixel response time, and high native refresh rate with excellent overall picture quality.
Cons
Con Very expensive
For the same price as this monitor, you can buy three decent 27-inch ultrawide monitors.
Con Bluetooth indicator is inconvenient
The monitor's Bluetooth indicator occupies the on-screen workspace. Unfortunately, there is no way to remove the indicator while using the Bluetooth speaker option.
Con Has an external power brick
The external power supply unit of the LG 38UC99-W might cause inconvenience especially if you want to mount this monitor on a wall since the PSU is quite bulky.
Con Wobbly
The stand isn't rigid, so you might observe some minor wobbling if your work desk is flimsy,
Con OSD is quite messy
The on-screen-display of the LG 38UC99-W does not have any programmable shortcut keys and is quite hard to navigate.
For example, to enable or disable the motion blur reduction feature, you’ll need to press more than 15 keys because the menu goes very deep.
Con Unsuitable for gaming
Gaming just doesn't feel responsive because of the monitor's massive input lag.
Con Lacks adaptive syncing
This monitor is not compatible with neither AMD’s Free-Sync nor Nvidia's G-Sync, which might be a deal breaker for newer systems.
Con Default settings are useless
To get the most out of monitor's picture quality, you'll need to spend some time adjusting its settings. Luckily, all the key setting values are available on the Internet.
The monitor's default color profile, FPS1, is useless as it degrades colors.
Con Lacks connectivity
Connectivity-wise, the BenQ ZOWIE XL241 offers only the bare minimum. You won't get anything apart from a humble HDMI 1.4 port, DVI-DL port, D-Sub port, and a 3.5mm headphone port.