Why haven’t we seen a glossy gaming monitor yet? It’s a fair question given that the best gaming monitors are dominated by matte panels, especially when you consider glossy creator displays like Apple’s ProDisplay XDR and LG UltraFine 5K. Matte may be the norm for gaming monitors, but the new Dough Spectrum 4K Glossy proves it may be time for gaming monitors to branch out.
Before getting into it, I need to clarify the whole Dough/Eve situation. The company Eve is now known as Dough, but the Spectrum 4K Glossy is the same monitor the company announced earlier this year. It’s a bit of a strange rebrand given that the company just launched a new monitor, but here we are.
The glaring elephant in the room
Apart from the glossy screen, this new monitor is almost identical to the Eve Spectrum 4K we reviewed last year, and all of my testing is nearly identical to what we found around mid-2021. It packs in all the features you’d expect out of a high-end gaming monitor —
Matte screens aren’t bad, and they’re the norm for good reason. They reduce eyestrain, have far less glare, and can resist things like dust and fingerprints. If reflections drive you up the wall or you’re sitting in a particularly bright room, you want a matte monitor. Gloss makes glare an issue.
The Spectrum
Dough didn’t just rip off the matte coating and call it a day. In fact, the company had to work directly with its panel supplier (LG, in case you were wondering) to recalibrate its assembly line to accommodate the manufacturing of the new display. That extra R&D time also went into making a coating to handle potential glare issues. And it works.
You don’t actually see more glare. It’s just more direct and not as diffused as what you’d find on a matte monitor. That ends up being a better viewing experience in darker rooms, as small light sources only cause a small area of glare — not the stretched, diffused glare you’d find on a matte monitor. That’s particularly a plus in color scenes.
Although you’ll notice glare much more in dark scenes on the Spectrum
Bad HDR on paper, beautiful in practice
The Dough Spectrum
But from the moment I booted up Destiny 2, it was clear: This is the best
Although there are only 16 local dimming zones, they make a huge difference on the Spectrum
I’ve been searching for a monitor that can offer an OLED experience, but the Spectrum
On the other end, you can see the dimming zones much clearer, unlike the smaller zones available on the Sony InZone M9. That’s a fair trade-off for me. Outside of a dedicated local dimming test, I was never able to spot one zone transitioning to another when actually playing a game or watching a movie.
I’ve been searching for a monitor that can provide anything near the experience of playing a game on a console with my LG C8 OLED (I know I’m a little behind the OLED curve) for nearly four years. The Spectrum Glossy
More than a finish
It’s easy to write off the Spectrum
TftCentral had a look at the display in March, taking some microscopic photos to see the differences between the finishes. The glossy version has better text and image clarity and that’s because the sub-pixels aren’t being filtered through a hazy matte finish. Instead of each of the red, green, and blue sub-pixels slightly fringing on their neighbors, every color is evenly separated.
That makes a huge difference in how vibrant colors look and how clear images and text are, especially on a
Glossy gaming monitors aren’t the norm, but the Dough Spectrum