For those about to game on a 23.8-inch 1440p monitor, I salute you
The new hotness: really small 1440p monitors?
There's a budding market for tiny 1440p gaming monitors. At least that's what I'm told. AOC just announced it's bringing one such tiny 23.8-inch 1440p screen to market in Europe, the Q24G2A/BK, and the reason being there's surprisingly demand for such a thing.
You can go too far with resolution and screen size. There are extremes. A 4K panel on a 55-inch panel is absurd for a desktop PC gamer, as the pixel density wouldn't be high enough to look great up-close. On a TV, some distance away, it's a different story. The same goes for a really small 4K monitor, which, while looking very sharp, would be a bit of a waste of the graphics card power required to drive that sort of pixel count.
You'd think the same thing about a sub-24-inch 1440p monitor. At that point just buy a 1080p panel and run it at a much faster refresh rate, or buy a bigger screen. But no, AOC tells me there's a market for that sort of high pixel density screen specifically built for gaming, and they're not entirely new to the scene.
The pre-existing market for this sort of thing has mostly been in Asia—AOC says it's been selling "thousands of these" in China—but it also believes there's enough interest to bring its AOC Q24G2A/BK screen to Europe too.
I don't have the specifics to hand regarding the North American market, but a cursory Google search would suggest it's not really landed in the States or Canada, either.
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The screen uses a 23.8-inch IPS panel with a 1440p resolution, making for a tight pixel density of 123 PPI. For the record, a 27-inch 1440p panel sits around 108 PPI, so this compact screen is considerably sharper. It's designed for gaming, so it comes with a 165Hz refresh rate, but it is a little slow on the response time at 4ms GtG. It's G-Sync Compatible and delivers Adaptive Sync, at least.
In Europe, this monitor will set you back €249, which means it's definitely up there with the cost of a larger 1440p gaming monitor. And it should go on sale imminently.
Yeah, this is a niche product for a very particular type of gamer that loves to get their eyeballs as close to the action as they possibly can. To those of you out there with such very specific needs, I salute you.