Since the refresh of the 32" G7 seems to have been pushed back to at least September, if not later, I was in need of a good display for my second system that wasn't a TV, and the other displays I've been trying haven't panned out I ended up grabbing the current 32" G7 (the Faker edition, as it was the same price and I've heard anecdotal reports of it being more likely to be properly calibrated and have less backlight bleed, on average).
Was worried at first as the display was shipped in the bare product box, which was in pretty rough shape by the time it got to me. However, there wasn't any physical damage to anything inside the box.
Display it self has some minor backlight uniformity issues and an almost imperceptible loss of about half a column of pixels at the extreme right edge near the corners when viewed from dead on at one diagonal length or less. No dead or stuck pixels though and only slight backlight bleed. Color and gamma is pretty good overall and didn't require much tweaking, though red is a little over saturated at the high-end and I had to reduce the black equalizer setting from 13 to 9 to eliminate black crush. Contrast ratio is a little low for a VA panel, but slightly better than my last VA display.
Response times are extremely good, easily matching most any other LCD based display of any kind that I've seen, even coming close to some 300Hz+ TN panels. Overdrive is also dynamic and well tuned for the VRR window; I did notice some inverse ghosting near the low end of the VRR range in content that was most prone to it, but most of the time it was imperceptible across the entire range.
At a fixed 240Hz refresh rate, the MBR strobe effect works pretty well. It could probably be more aggressive, as it's only blanking for 1.17ms per refresh (out of 4.17ms), but this means that it's also not harming brightness as much as the effect does on most other displays with the feature and probably helps keep the strobe imperceptible to those sensitive to strobing artifacts. With it enabled at maximum refresh, there is less motion blur on this display than on any other LCD I've personally tried, which is a big plus for me.
HDR also works, though just barely. HDR600 is about the bottom tier for useful 10-bit HDR and this G7 has just enough brightness to do justice to HDR and MBR at the same time, if the local dimming zones are enabled. Speaking of which, the local dimming on this display is not good (a paltry eight zones), but having it enabled seems to allow for a significant peak brightness boost, which makes the other brightness reducing features workable.
I'm finding it easier to adjust to the severe 1000R curve than I expected, but it really does demand that one sit directly in front of it at the correct angle and distance.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the display and this sample. It's not perfect, but it does things no other display can currently do, and more importantly, is the first display I've tried in the last two years that isn't significantly worse than my placeholder display. That Pixio PX329 was damn impressive for 300 dollars when I bought it just over two years ago, and is still impressive at that price now. I'm not sure this G7 is a better value (the Pixio is probably a better $300 monitor than this is a $700 one), but it has a third of pixel response time and more than twice the peak brightness, without being worse in much of anything, so I'm content.
