MSI MPG 491CQPX QD-OLED 49-inch QD-OLED 5120 x 1440 (DQHD) Computer Monitor, 240Hz, Adaptive-Sync, HDMI, Display Port, VGA Port, VESA Mountable, Tilt, Height Adjustable, Speaker, 0.03ms, Black

Top-Tier Ultrawide OLED for Gaming
Fantastic gaming monitor! The OLED panel delivers deep blacks, rich colors, and amazing contrast. The 240Hz refresh rate makes gameplay incredibly smooth, and the curved ultrawide format is super immersive for both gaming and movies. HDR looks great with bright highlights and clean detail. Premium build quality and a sturdy stand round it out, an excellent ultra-wide OLED for gaming and media.

Beats Expectations! Amazing QD-OLED
If you buy this monitor, you can expect all the pros and cons of QD-OLEDs: extremely vibrant colors, deep blacks, great color accuracy, great HDR, but not so great brightness. QD-OLED in particular isn’t as good as WOLEDs in bright rooms.But regardless of the tradeoffs, MSI has nailed it!Pros1. HDR is beautiful with latest firmware update: EOTF boost mode. Colors POP!2. No active cooling required!3. Brighter than expected, especially in SDR mode.4. Colors look AMAZING.5. The 240 Hz refresh rate feels great, makes a huge difference in games!6. The KVM mode is cool. You can do PIP or screen split with multiple computers7. MSI is still updating and supporting it.Cons1. If you do not update the firmware, HDR will look washed out2. Display is rather thin. Doesn’t feel that sturdy though it’s high quality3. Glossy surface catches fingerprints4. Not as bright as newer models, though for $699 on black Friday this was a steal!

This thing is amazing!
Just bite the bullet!Coming from an Alienware AW2723DF this is a night and day upgrade. I bought that monitor two years ago because OLED was too expensive. I really wish I wouldn’t have wasted my money and spent the extra dollars for an OLED. It’s by far the best gaming experience you can have. I was extremely skeptical of buying an ultrawide monitor due to older reviews (5+ years ago) about limitations with web pages and such. I also read the RTINGs review of the monitor and it mentioned how the text isn’t crisp like IPS monitors. Needless to say neither of these are an issue for me.First, web pages load correctly and display across the whole screen. Whatever issues they had years ago seem to have been resolved. I haven’t come across any sites that do not display properly. Second, I cannot tell the difference of the text from my old IPS monitor and this one. Granted, I’ve not looked at them side by side but legibility is not an issue and text isn’t bothersome. Don’t let that hold you back from buying this thing.This monitor also is more adjustable than my Alienware as it could only be adjusted horizontally and vertically. This OLED monitor not only adjusts vertically and horizontally but also you to angle it up.Onto gaming. My old Alienware was a great gaming monitor but being an IPS it had its limitations with blacks. I could see the hot spots from the backlight pretty clearly and quite frankly, it’s annoying. I am used to Plasma and OLED TVs and after switching from my PS5 to PC gaming it was a downgrade. I figured colors were great on my Alienware monitor; however, switching to this OLED showed how much better the OLEDs color accuracy is. Colors are much more vibrant and more accurate.I’m giving this 4 stars for some petty reasons. First, the included HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB B cables are too short. I need an extra foot or two for the cables to reach my PC and the cables they provide are just not long enough. Next this monitor uses USB B 2.0 and my Alienware came with USB B 3.0. The Alienware cables were long enough but the fact that MSI choose to use USB 2.0 means that I have to shell out money for new cable just so it can reach my PC.Overall I’m thoroughly impressed with this monitor and I have no regrets buying it.

Si compras el monitor y puedes esperar a que te llegue porque tarda un poco en llegar, hazlo, vale totalmente la pena, el OLED en estos monitores es otro nivel, me preocupaba las barras negras a la hora de ver contenido multimedia que no es compatible con el formato UW pero la verdad es que no se nota para nada ya que al ser OLED apaga por completo y no se notan esas líneas, para juegos, es una delicia el formato UW y la calidad de los colores ni se diga, siempre había jugado en 27″ o 32″ ahora que pude probar este UW se me hará muy difícil volver a una resolución de 27″ o 32″ , principalmente porque los problemas que podías experimentar en los UW ips casi son imperceptibles ahora con la tecnología OLED, vale cada centavo este monitor, sin duda se los recomiendo antes que cualquier otro UW OLED msi se caracteriza por hacer productos de muy alta calidad

I’m very pleased with this monitor so far, having had it for a week. Playing through the intro to Horizon: Forbidden West, in glorious HDR, is simply incredible. Even the HDR demos on youtube leave me with my jaw to the floor.What surprised me the most was all the things that reviews of QD-OLED monitors warn you about, and how those turned out to be nothing, at least for me.- HDR on at all timesI’m using Windows 11, and a GPU that supports HDMI 2.1 (with a 2.1 certified cable). The internet says that HDR needs to be off for SDR (ie standard) content, but I am finding that is not the case at all. I have it on all the time, and everything looks perfect to me. The HDR effect is noticeable in most things, and as far as I can tell, the colour accuracy is also there (caveat: I’m no expert). I went through the Windows HDR Calibration app later, and it claims to have improved the highlights. I had no complaints before, so, yay.- BrightnessI don’t understand what people are talking about when they say that QD-OLED technology is not bright enough. I have mine set to True Black 400, and it’s plenty bright. I find I’m reaching for the dark modes in apps even more aggressively than before, since a sudden white screen (eg a website, or Excel) is almost too much for me :). Tip: look for a Chrome extension that automatically turns most websites to dark mode.- Text clarityI had forgotten that this was even something I was supposed to worry about. It was days later that I remembered about it, and I went looking for it. I still cannot see the problem, at all. White text everywhere has a healthy white glow to it (compared to my old IPS monitor – I don’t mean actual backlight bleed or anything), which ought to improve clarity if anything.- 1800R curveHaving been used to 3400R for 9 years, I thought 1800R might be too much for me. That has not been the case at all, thankfully. I don’t even notice the difference, most of the time. 1800R is very pleasing, and might even be the new sweet spot for me.- Reflections in a bright room / pink tintThis just hasn’t been an issue for me at all. If anything, the situation is better than my old monitor. However, I am usually in a dark room, and the monitor is facing away from the window. Plus, I have dark curtains.Other easily solvable issues:- 110 vs 240 volts (power input)I ordered the monitor from Amazon US, but I live in the UK. Luckily, I had no problems with the mains voltage difference. As stated in the manual, the monitor supports both kinds. I used a UK power cable from another monitor, and that was it.- The sockets at the back are placed too low, for some reason. I have the monitor on a flexible arm, and I need it to be almost at desk level (long story). That problem was easily solved with angled adaptors, like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00T2TP7VM and https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BGJ96WHY.- I used to use VLC as a video player for most things. It seems the current public version has a bug with the rendering of the subtitles in HDR. I now recommend switching to MPC-BE. It seems better in a lot of ways, so far.Speaking of VLC or MPC-BE, they both play back my own HDR videos beautifully. Both those from my phone (with HDR on) and my camera (HLG mode). Even my photos from my phone look much more pleasing on this monitor.It’s not all positives though. The risk of burn-in is still something to be taken seriously, by all accounts. My experience so far with MSI OLED Care 2.0, and Panel Protect specifically, has been mixed. On the one hand, I got the first popup after 4 hours, and I easily dismissed it with a click of the mouse (via the Gaming Intelligence app). For a few days, I didn’t hear from it again, and I even wondered if it’s working at all. Of course, even though I switch all my devices off at night, I make sure not to switch this monitor off at all. I can confirm via the monitor’s built-in menu (not sure why the Intelligence app doesn’t show this) that Panel Protect has been running, seemingly once a day. Great, I thought.However, I work from home, and sometimes that means the monitor is on for 8 hours for work, and 8 more for my own entertainment in the evening. That’s 16 hours, which is the maximum you can go without running Panel Protect. Two nights in a row, it interrupted me during a film :(. That was NOT a great experience. It takes about 6-8 mins, and you can do nothing while it’s running. If it ever happens in the middle of some multiplayer game, I’ll be extremely annoyed! So, I have started building a habit of manually running it at the start of my lunch breaks, while I prepare food or whatever. That seems like a good compromise. I wish they had a setting to force the protection at 24 hours, or even 18. 16 is just at the limit for me, sadly. (EDIT: see below)Having said all that, I was thoroughly warned about the issues with burn-in, from all the online reviews, and I expected to face these problems. It is just a limitation of the technology, and we just need to accept it really. If this is the only problem I will ever face, I’ll be very happy, considering the amazing picture quality I get.One related thing that worried me before I bought the monitor was all the Chrome tabs I tend to keep open, usually for months. I even have pinned tabs that are permanently there. Everything else was solvable, with things like hiding the Windows taskbar, switching to dark mode for everything, ensuring the screensaver is active, setting Windows to go to sleep after a bit, etc. There was no solution for the Chrome tabs though. In the end, I did some research, and found that Vivaldi (a Chrome-based browser, therefore easy to switch to it) supports customisation of its window. Some kind person on their forums wrote a script that will auto-hide the tab bar in Vivaldi, much like Windows can auto-hide its taskbar. Search for “AutoHide Tab Bar + Address Bar | Show on Hover”. It’s not perfect, and you have to keep reinstalling it every week, when Vivaldi updates itself, but it solves the problem.I don’t know how the problem of burn-in will play out in the long term. I will try to remember to update this review, if I ever notice this problem (or any others). Meanwhile, I take comfort from people’s burn-in experiments, eg on youtube.Another issue I noticed, which I was also warned about, is VRR flicker. At least I think that’s what it is. I’ve not noticed it in games so far, only in Windows. I have the monitor set to 120 Hz for every day use, and I use the Windows 11 setting called Dynamic Refresh Rate (Settings > Display > Advanced display). With that, whenever Windows is idling, the refresh rate drops to 60 Hz, which is great in theory. However, with the slightest mouse movement or screen scrolling, the refresh rate instantly switches to 120 for a bit. I think that results in noticeably increased smoothness, but it also seems to cause this almost imperceptible flicker, sometimes. It’s only really noticeable in dark or gray backgrounds. Once you notice it, it’s hard to unsee, unfortunately. Well, there are easy solutions: stick with either 120 Hz at all times, or 60 Hz (and only switch up for games), or ignore it. I haven’t decided yet. Hopefully it will be as easily solvable in games, if I ever experience it.Overall, I’m assigning 4 stars to this monitor, easily. I’m subtracting one mostly for the amount of effort I had to go through to solve the issue with the Chrome tabs. I’m glad there is a solution to that though, and I can now easily recommend this monitor to most people.UPDATE (4 months later):- There is now a firmware update that raises the forced OLED Care period to 24h, which is ideal I would say. Phew. I still have to worry about turning my PC off for just a bit, in case I’ll come back to it 5 mins later and the monitor will have started the panel refresh thing in the middle of the day. Overall though, it is now something I just don’t worry about anymore. It will never interrupt me again the middle of a film or game. Thanks for listening, MSI!- No signs of burn in so far. Not that I’ve gone looking, but it’s hopefully way too early to worry about this.- I’ve had a stuck pixel, 3 weeks in… 🙁 I decided to return the monitor and get a replacement, and so far, it hasn’t happened again. Here’s hoping it will stay that way.- I’ve switched to 60Hz permanently, while in Windows. No flickering this way. I have a script that I use to launch my games, which turns the refresh rate to 120Hz, and then automatically back to 60Hz after I exited the game. Problem solved.- I’ve switched to Peak 1000 mode, for now. I go back and forth on whether this is better and more accurate… On the one hand, HDR-aware apps that query the monitor’s capabilities (eg MPC-BE), always seem to think that the monitor can do 1000 nits, and so they adjust their output accordingly, not knowing that the monitor is set to 400 nits (True Black 400). This results in over-bright highlights, ie lost detail. It was obvious with my camera’s HLG videos. Peak 1000 solves this issue, and maybe it also improves things in games and films, not that I had noticed problems there. Unfortunately, Peak 1000 does not result in a consistent output… The monitor CONSTANTLY adjusts its output, presumably because it can’t maintain true 1000 nits for very long (even if it’s only advertised for 10% of the screen). This results in a very obvious “pulsing” of the overall brightness, which is fast enough to ruin the experience. This pulsing happened once as I was writing this update to my review, even though there was no obvious reason for it. Normally, you can tell it happens because of switching from a dark to a bright web page, for example, which I still find distracting. I miss the stability and consistency/uniformity of True Black 400… I may go back to it, and just try to remember to switch to Peak 1000 when I watch content or play games. If only there was a command line tool that could automate the switch… Man, first world problems are the worst 😉

Very good and bright panel, as one would frankly expect from an OLED. Also it does have the VRR flickering issue that all oleds seem to have, as it’s innate to the technology. So do yr research which panel tech is best for your needs. Positive surprise is the feature rich menu of the panel and the software that can also setup the panel. E.g I didn’t expect Adobe RGB profile on a gaming monitor! Only downside I would mention is the oled care of MSI is a bit intrusive, and could be smarter (it cannot be programmed e.g to run every night). I never had this come up with my oled TV, but I suppose static pc content increases the risk of burn in. So hopefully it preserves the panel’s quality.l, in which case it’s a fair trade off against the amazing oled screen quality. Just be mindful of these drawbacks when going from IPS to OLED..