I've learned a few new things and made some other observations today.
1: My DisplayCAL calibration, whilst visually looks good to my eyes and not far off the old LG IPS, is not strictly "accurate" as DisplayCAL is a GUI for Argyll CMS, which needs a correction profile when profiling a display so it knows what colorimeter is being used on what display etc. There's only one way to do this and that's using a spectrometer. These cost ££££ for the HW and SW alone and only really used by actual pros in industry etc. Luckily on the DIsplayCAL forums someone is due to get their QD-OLED delivery in May, and they have the i1Display Pro calibrator as well as a spectrometer, so a bunch of people with these Alienwares are waiting for that one person to generate the correction profile so we can apply that in DisplayCAL and then get a proper calibration done.
2: The downlight is actually a touch sensitive light bar. It's too dim to be of any use though sadly so a bit of a waste of engineering making it a touch bar.
3: There are TWO fans inside this monitor. I thought the fan ramping up sometimes was the same one fan but nope, sat at my desk right now writing this I can hear the main fan that is quietly humming away as normal, and in the middle area at the back of the monitor I can hear another fan spooling up then down to 0rpm again for a few minutes. It only lasts a few minutes of this spooling upa nd down so I imagine it's doing some cooling cycle for the panel or something as the fan that's always on must be the one on the GSync/FPGA module.
4: SDR movies and media in general, when they have really dark scenes where one area blends gradually into black or really dark tones that may as well be black, the way that gradient blends into black is too obvious and not entirely a smooth gradient if that makes sense. I noticed the same way back when I got the 65" LG OLED in the living room and was watching content up close etc. I imagine this is because OLED by nature has a wide dynamic range, and SDR content is only going to cover so much of it. Even though the monitor is in 10bit mode, you aren't going to magically gain extra dynamic range to cover this smooth gradual transition from dark to black throughout a frame. HDR solves this but SDR content is not HDR, and no content creator produces SDR content that is 10bit (which is what mostly HDR content uses). Some games are 10bit colour, but aside form that, there's no way around this watching SDR content on an OLED.
I did install MadVR and enabled it in MPC-BE and watched scenes from the Hobbit again as well as Avengers End Game. MadVR helped a lot and it also allows pixel shader based tone mapping from HDR to SDR (useful for me as I prefer running full time SDR anyway in Windows) - But because of the way MadVR works, you can see the almost ABL-style scene detection and adjustment it does in some scenes, so depending on the kind of movie being watched, could be annoying as it is noticeable.
It's something that will have to be lived with maybe as SDR content is not going to shift to HDR for everything at any point in the future because SDR content will always exist.
Edit** I have fixed the above in Media Player Classic! After much messing around I found this works and balances out the dark scenes with a smooth gradual shift into the not black areas of frame:
Obviously it still happens on stuff like youtube or other websites through a browser or other app player (Netflix etc.
Lastly, can anyone check their panel by shining a torch at it when it's off to see if you have what I have? There are impression marks on the surface around some edges of the front panel where that bubble style cover was attached at the factory to protect during transit. It's only been pressed up against the panel and left some marks. Just wondering what product I can use to clean it off as don't want to damage the AR coating if I use the wrong chemicals etc!
Here's what mine looks like:
It is only visible when you shine a torch at it like this.
Don't make a hobbit of it mate.
All these puns, so many of them!
