The Kurai Gaming Monitor Review: A Budget-Friendly OLED Option with Impressive Performance

When it comes to gaming monitors, many enthusiasts are willing to splurge on high-end options from reputable brands. However, for those looking for a more affordable alternative, the Kurai Gaming Monitor is an intriguing option worth considering. In this review, we'll delve into the features and performance of this budget-friendly OLED monitor.

One notable feature of the Kurai Gaming Monitor is its brightness level, which provides a noticeably brighter image compared to non-OLED monitors. This is particularly useful for gaming enthusiasts who want their displays to appear more vibrant and immersive. The monitor's brightness levels are comparable to those of high-end OLED options from other brands, with warm color temperature mode producing around 240 nits and standard mode reaching 250 nits.

A key benefit of OLED technology is its response time, which is arguably the most important factor for gaming enthusiasts. The Kurai Gaming Monitor boasts a blisteringly fast 0.1 millisecond response time, making it ideal for fast-paced games that require quick pixel switching. This results in a perfectly clean image with no ghosting or artifacting from previous frames. The monitor's performance in this regard is on par with more expensive options from other brands.

Another feature worth noting is the display latency, which was tested using NVIDIA's Laptops and Display software as well as side-by-side testing against the Asus with the same panel. Both monitors performed identically, but the Kurai Gaming Monitor's HDR capabilities were found to be slightly superior. The monitor's peak brightness levels were higher, making it stand out in HDR content.

The Kurai Gaming Monitor also features a semi-matte coating on its display surface, which helps reduce reflections and diffuses light evenly. While this may not be as appealing to those who prefer glossy surfaces, the reviewer personally prefers the matte finish for their own setup. The monitor's overall build quality is also noteworthy, with no apparent signs of any noticeable defects or issues.

In terms of drawbacks, one notable concern is the limited panel warranty offered by Kurai, which only lasts for 1 year. In contrast, more expensive options from other brands often come with longer warranties, providing added peace of mind for enthusiasts who invest in high-end hardware. However, this limitation is largely offset by the monitor's impressive performance and value for money.

Another potential issue is the lack of manual pixel cleaning functions on the Kurai Gaming Monitor. This may be a concern for some users who engage in extended gaming sessions or experience screen burn-in. However, the reviewer notes that unless you're using the monitor extensively with full brightness for 24 hours straight, it's unlikely to cause any issues.

In conclusion, the Kurai Gaming Monitor is an impressive budget-friendly option for those looking for a high-performance OLED display. While some limitations exist, including its relatively short warranty and lack of manual pixel cleaning functions, these are largely outweighed by its numerous benefits. With its exceptional brightness levels, blistering response time, and HDR capabilities, this monitor is sure to delight gaming enthusiasts on a budget.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso this 1440p OLED came out a little over a year and a half ago it was $11,000 back then these days you can find it for like $800 maybe 700 if you're lucky or you could get this one here which is a little over $500 and the crazy thing is these have the exact same panel 1440p 240 HZ with a W OLED panel from LG granted it is the first gen OLED panel that we saw a year and a half ago but that is still really really good by today's standards and when you put it next to an IPS monitor at the same price I mean I guess I'll just let you decide which one you'd prefer to play on OLED colors look significantly better and the contrast is at a different level but what exactly are you losing here versus those more expensive options from name brands like Corsair and Asus which have the exact same panel that is what I wanted to find out we got to talk about this stand and overall design though you know this is typically where budget monitor Brands will save a lot of money they'll just make an L Cheapo stand with no height adjustment or anything this thing has all of the adjustment that you could possibly want and the thing actually looks really good Cai apparently know how to make a really clean looking monitor it does look like metal because it's this nice neutral gray with a sparkly kind of finish bit it is actually plastic uh yeah so no surprises there but it still does look very clean with very minimal branding you also have some nice diffused RGB Lighting on the back of the panel as well not that you'll ever see that but it is a nice touch my only gripe with this stand is that it is quite wobbly it's not a very stable stand like the Asus metal tripod thing which is very very Overkill this one does tend to wobble but I don't think it's going to be an issue if you have a really solid rigid desk at the end of the day you can just Chuck this on a monitor arm if you do encounter that issue booting the monitor up though for the first time it looks pretty good honestly nothing out of the ordinary at all it's a very familiar looking panel you've got a few different color temperature options as well the most accurate one is warm there you'll get an almost perfect white point of 6,500 k with extremely minimal tint testing the brightness though I did notice something kind of interesting the overall brightness on this monitor shifts depending on what's being displayed this is also known as non-uniform brightness and it's actually pretty good because it gives you a noticeably Brighter Image than without it so if you're playing games and you want it to look a bit brighter this is typically something that I'll turn on on other monitors the problem is there's no way to turn it off or lock the brightness like you can with other oleds which is a bit annoy specifically if you edit videos or photos for example and you take that stuff kind of seriously this is kind of a deal breaker as for what kind of brightness levels we're working with here it's actually surprisingly good with the warm color temperature mode I was getting around 240 nits and with the standard mode which runs a little bit cool we're getting around 250 that's actually a bit brighter than LG's own monitor using this exact same panel and when I put it side by side next to the Asus and also turn non-uniform brightness on that one the Asus does get a little little bit brighter but it's not a massive difference the panel Surface by the way is the exact same as what's on the Asus it's a semi matte coating which diffuses Reflections really well and personally I really prefer that over glossy for my own setup next up let's take a look at the response times which is arguably my favorite thing about OLED gaming monitors the pixels here can switch color virtually instantly that means that every frame that you see on this monitor is a perfectly clean frame there's no ghost from previous frames and there's no artifacting from the pixels switching that fast it's just a really clear image and this one is no different 0.1 millisecond response times here with practically no overshoot I even dug a little bit deeper and looked at the individual transition times and overshoots they all look pretty normal for an OLED which is to say basically perfect I also quickly checked the display latency against the Asus with the same panel both in nvidia's lat software and side by side with a high-speed camera both monitors are identical but then there's HDR and this is where I expected to see a really big difference it's typically an area where you'll see the big name brands go that extra distance when it comes to tuning and firmware and calibration but here the kurai did exceptionally well I will admit this is a very consumer basic side-by-side comparison between the kurai on the left and the Asus on the right but when we isolate the displays and look at the waveforms in my editing software to compare the brightness and the Peaks you know how bright is each display the kurai is actually a little bit better the overall HDR brightness is higher and the Peaks for those little HDR hotspots are brighter as well I checked both the cinema HDR and the gaming HDR mode on the Asus and the kurai was just brighter than both of them just seemed to pop off the display a little bit more we're not looking at HDR tracking or correctness here again it's a very basic comparison but I've got to say the Cai looks very very impressive when turning on HDR especially considering it's the cheaper option now in terms of the features here to prevent screen burning I can't really work out what these menu options are but I did notice that the cide does dim down automatically after about 5 minutes which is really good and I did also see it pixel shifting roughly every minute the truth is though unless you're like abusing these displays and running static content full brightness 24 hours of the day it's unlikely that you'll see any Burnin at all I didn't find any manual pixel cleaning functions here but I don't think you're going to have a problem probably the biggest downside of the kurai though is the limited panel warranty I bought it through Amazon where they list a warranty of 1 year I've personally never had an issue with monitors suddenly dying on me but on the rare occasion it can happen the Asus on the other hand and most other brands list a 2-year warranty at least so if you're already at the point where you're looking at $400 $500 gaming monitors say it is 100% worth it just saving that extra little bit and upgrading to an OLED and I know we haven't spoken about it much but apart from being an OLED it is 1440p 240 HZ which I guess is like the sweet spot at the moment in fact most people would consider that to be pretty Overkill with those settings you can feel like you're like maxing out almost 100% of games out there sure there are now 4K oleds and 400 and 80 HZ oleds but they're also like doubl the price versus this one this on the other hand I was super impressed with I did not expect it to be as good as the name brand options using the exact same panel I got to say at 500 bucks I don't think you can beat thisso this 1440p OLED came out a little over a year and a half ago it was $11,000 back then these days you can find it for like $800 maybe 700 if you're lucky or you could get this one here which is a little over $500 and the crazy thing is these have the exact same panel 1440p 240 HZ with a W OLED panel from LG granted it is the first gen OLED panel that we saw a year and a half ago but that is still really really good by today's standards and when you put it next to an IPS monitor at the same price I mean I guess I'll just let you decide which one you'd prefer to play on OLED colors look significantly better and the contrast is at a different level but what exactly are you losing here versus those more expensive options from name brands like Corsair and Asus which have the exact same panel that is what I wanted to find out we got to talk about this stand and overall design though you know this is typically where budget monitor Brands will save a lot of money they'll just make an L Cheapo stand with no height adjustment or anything this thing has all of the adjustment that you could possibly want and the thing actually looks really good Cai apparently know how to make a really clean looking monitor it does look like metal because it's this nice neutral gray with a sparkly kind of finish bit it is actually plastic uh yeah so no surprises there but it still does look very clean with very minimal branding you also have some nice diffused RGB Lighting on the back of the panel as well not that you'll ever see that but it is a nice touch my only gripe with this stand is that it is quite wobbly it's not a very stable stand like the Asus metal tripod thing which is very very Overkill this one does tend to wobble but I don't think it's going to be an issue if you have a really solid rigid desk at the end of the day you can just Chuck this on a monitor arm if you do encounter that issue booting the monitor up though for the first time it looks pretty good honestly nothing out of the ordinary at all it's a very familiar looking panel you've got a few different color temperature options as well the most accurate one is warm there you'll get an almost perfect white point of 6,500 k with extremely minimal tint testing the brightness though I did notice something kind of interesting the overall brightness on this monitor shifts depending on what's being displayed this is also known as non-uniform brightness and it's actually pretty good because it gives you a noticeably Brighter Image than without it so if you're playing games and you want it to look a bit brighter this is typically something that I'll turn on on other monitors the problem is there's no way to turn it off or lock the brightness like you can with other oleds which is a bit annoy specifically if you edit videos or photos for example and you take that stuff kind of seriously this is kind of a deal breaker as for what kind of brightness levels we're working with here it's actually surprisingly good with the warm color temperature mode I was getting around 240 nits and with the standard mode which runs a little bit cool we're getting around 250 that's actually a bit brighter than LG's own monitor using this exact same panel and when I put it side by side next to the Asus and also turn non-uniform brightness on that one the Asus does get a little little bit brighter but it's not a massive difference the panel Surface by the way is the exact same as what's on the Asus it's a semi matte coating which diffuses Reflections really well and personally I really prefer that over glossy for my own setup next up let's take a look at the response times which is arguably my favorite thing about OLED gaming monitors the pixels here can switch color virtually instantly that means that every frame that you see on this monitor is a perfectly clean frame there's no ghost from previous frames and there's no artifacting from the pixels switching that fast it's just a really clear image and this one is no different 0.1 millisecond response times here with practically no overshoot I even dug a little bit deeper and looked at the individual transition times and overshoots they all look pretty normal for an OLED which is to say basically perfect I also quickly checked the display latency against the Asus with the same panel both in nvidia's lat software and side by side with a high-speed camera both monitors are identical but then there's HDR and this is where I expected to see a really big difference it's typically an area where you'll see the big name brands go that extra distance when it comes to tuning and firmware and calibration but here the kurai did exceptionally well I will admit this is a very consumer basic side-by-side comparison between the kurai on the left and the Asus on the right but when we isolate the displays and look at the waveforms in my editing software to compare the brightness and the Peaks you know how bright is each display the kurai is actually a little bit better the overall HDR brightness is higher and the Peaks for those little HDR hotspots are brighter as well I checked both the cinema HDR and the gaming HDR mode on the Asus and the kurai was just brighter than both of them just seemed to pop off the display a little bit more we're not looking at HDR tracking or correctness here again it's a very basic comparison but I've got to say the Cai looks very very impressive when turning on HDR especially considering it's the cheaper option now in terms of the features here to prevent screen burning I can't really work out what these menu options are but I did notice that the cide does dim down automatically after about 5 minutes which is really good and I did also see it pixel shifting roughly every minute the truth is though unless you're like abusing these displays and running static content full brightness 24 hours of the day it's unlikely that you'll see any Burnin at all I didn't find any manual pixel cleaning functions here but I don't think you're going to have a problem probably the biggest downside of the kurai though is the limited panel warranty I bought it through Amazon where they list a warranty of 1 year I've personally never had an issue with monitors suddenly dying on me but on the rare occasion it can happen the Asus on the other hand and most other brands list a 2-year warranty at least so if you're already at the point where you're looking at $400 $500 gaming monitors say it is 100% worth it just saving that extra little bit and upgrading to an OLED and I know we haven't spoken about it much but apart from being an OLED it is 1440p 240 HZ which I guess is like the sweet spot at the moment in fact most people would consider that to be pretty Overkill with those settings you can feel like you're like maxing out almost 100% of games out there sure there are now 4K oleds and 400 and 80 HZ oleds but they're also like doubl the price versus this one this on the other hand I was super impressed with I did not expect it to be as good as the name brand options using the exact same panel I got to say at 500 bucks I don't think you can beat this\n"