The Best 4K Monitors

The LG 27UD68P-B is the best 4K monitor for most people because of its great color and grayscale measurements, thin bezels, three-way adjustable stand, and easy-to-use menus. It also has FreeSync adaptive sync, which makes it even better for gaming if you have an AMD video card. The LG doesn’t have USB 3.0 hub and its grayscale tracking isn’t as good as our runner-up pick’s, although its color accuracy is much better. At a price comparable with monitors with lower resolutions, this is a great display for anyone ready to make the jump to 4K.

The 27UD68P-B is factory calibrated, and out of the box images are color-accurate and detailed. In the color saturation test, the 27UD68P-B had an overall DeltaE value of 1.94. Above 80 percent brightness, though, the individual DeltaE values for red, green, and yellow creep up toward 3.0, and yellow hits that number at 100 percent color saturation. That means you’ll see slightly inaccurate yellows in more vivid images—a picture of a field of sunflowers will look a bit unnatural. The ColorChecker test—which measures the accuracy of over 100 colors representing skin tones, the sky, and other natural elements—had a DeltaE of 2.35, and the number for primary and secondary color points was 2.25. Grayscale tracking average was 2.31, with a slightly higher number at increased brightness levels—it’s very good below 50 percent brightness.

Contrast ratio is the measurement of a fully lit white screen versus an unlit black screen at a fixed brightness level. The contrast ratio of the 27UD68P-B, at 1186:1, was the highest of all the monitors we tested. This is an excellent number for a monitor, especially an IPS panel, and it means the bright parts of the screen will look vibrant and really pop out next to blacks (think images of fireworks in a night sky).

The LG 27UD68P-B has a wide luminance range. At its highest brightness setting, a full white field on the monitor outputs 287 cd/m² of light—slightly under LG’s claimed 300 cd/m², but still enough for a sunlit room. At its lowest, the monitor light output drops to 59 cd/m², which will limit the fatigue on your eyes while playing Overwatch in a dark room.

The 27UD68P-B is VESA-compatible and has a stand that can adjust height, tilt, and pivot. The stand has 4.7 inches of height adjustment, up to a maximum height of 21.13 inches from the top of the screen to the desktop. The monitor can tilt forward 5 degrees or back 20 degrees and can pivot clockwise into a portrait position. Unlike the stands of our Dell or Benq picks, the stand cannot swivel.

Like recent monitors from Dell and HP, the 27UD68P-B has very thin side and top bezels, at just over a quarter of an inch thick on the top and sides (8 mm), though the .9-inch (23 mm) bottom bezel is significantly larger. Unlike most monitors, which are controlled with a line of buttons along the lower right of the frame, the 27UD68P-B has a four-way joystick situated underneath the bottom bezel at the center. It took a short while to get used to, but once we did we loved the ease of use. Menu navigation is quick, and being able to keep your finger in one place to move through every menu option is convenient. It’s far better than the capacitive buttons many monitor makers use.

The LG has one DisplayPort 1.2 port and two HDMI 2.0 inputs for connecting computers or other A/V sources, like a PlayStation 4 Pro or a 4K-capable Roku or Apple TV box, but it’s missing the USB 3.0 hub and the Mini DisplayPort found on both the Dell U2718Q and BenQ PD3200U.The only additional port is a headphone-out jack for audio streams sent over DisplayPort or HDMI. The volume level can be controlled by moving the joystick toggle left and right. All of the connections are on the back of the monitor, so if you need to regularly plug and unplug cables it could be tedious.

There are a few options on the 27UD68P-B that cater to gamers. The most prominent is FreeSync, which reduces screen tearing by locking the refresh rate of the monitor to the frame rate of the video card. It’s supported only over DisplayPort, not HDMI, and must be connected to either a discrete graphics card or an integrated GPU that supports it; right now, the only CPUs and GPUs that support the technology come from AMD. (Nvidia has its own adaptive-sync technology, called G-Sync, which requires both an Nvidia graphics card and a monitor with a special chip in it.)

Another gaming-oriented menu option is called Black Stabilizer. It boosts the brightness in darker gray areas of the screen, which could help keep you alive during those long online gaming sessions, especially if the room you’re playing in has ambient light that makes it difficult to distinguish the shadows on screen. We don’t recommend using the feature for anything other than gaming, though, as it sacrifices black level accuracy for an edge in gaming combat.

The LG 27UD68P-B has a one-year parts and labor warranty. LG will either repair or replace the unit, at its discretion, but it doesn’t have a bright/dead pixel policy (see “Flaws but not dealbreakers,” below). 144HzMonitors.com named it the Best 4K IPS FreeSync Monitor, MonitorNerds named it the Best 4K Gaming Monitor, and 4K.com found it to have “superb performance quality almost entirely across the board.” RTings.com gave it a good score for mixed usage—this monitor is good at just about everything.

LG sells two monitors nearly identical to the 27UD68P-B. The 27UD68-W is the same monitor with a white case and silver-colored stand, and the 27UD68-P has a stand without height or pivot adjustments. It does have VESA mounts, though, and it’s often a little cheaper than the 27UD68P-B, so it’s a good choice if you already have a monitor arm you like.