Corsair Xeneon Flex: Everything To Know
Every once in a while, we come across a product that is so strange that it makes us scratch our heads and wonder who it is made for. Take the Corsair Xeneon Flex gaming monitor, which sells for $1,999. This big gamer may look like nothing more than a big ultrawide monitor, but it has a pretty cool trick: a beautiful OLED ultrawide panel that can bend from a flat surface into a curved monitor with a radius as small as 800mm.
Corsair Xeneon Flex has everything you need to play current-generation consoles and beefed-up PCs. We’re not giving this big, special panel an Editors’ Rating score right now, though, because the unit we looked at was a pre-retail sample, and several problems that came up during our testing show that Corsair needs to do some tuning.
Everything To Know About Corsair Xeneon Flex
Corsair Xeneon Flex Pros
- Has a tight 800mm radius of curvature
- Several ports
- The OLED screen looks nice at first glance.
Corsair Xeneon Flex Cons
- The brightness is low by default.
- No speakers
Corsair Xeneon Flex ultrawide monitor is slim and flexible, with thin bezels on all four sides that make it look almost like a picture frame. All the monitor’s ports are on its stand, which connects to the back of the monitor. This lets the monitor’s body stay thin.
The monitor could be more flexible because of the air, which is a vertical bar. For example, you can tilt the screen forward or back, but you can’t change the height of the frame. You also won’t get a VESA mount, but the way this monitor is made, it wouldn’t be easy to mount it anyway. (In our worst-case scenario, this 45-inch panel would come out of the drywall on your wall if you bent it too much.) Also, this unit doesn’t have any speakers built in. These omissions may have been necessary to make the part with the bendable panel work as well as it does, but some users may need to catch them.
On the front are two more USB ports: an input-select button, an OSD control stick, and a 3.5mm port for headphones. So, what about that group? The Xeneon Flex is one of the giant monitors we’ve seen recently. It’s about 22.75 by 41.8 by 18.1 inches (HWD). A 45-inch screen is not typical for gaming, but we’ve seen 49-inch monitors for both business and gaming, like the LG 49WL95C-W. (see the Samsung Odyssey G9). It weighs about 22.75 pounds, which is light for a screen this size.
Points That Should Be Noticed
- Right away, it’s clear that the Corsair Xeneon Flex is best for a specific type of gamer, but it can still do well in other situations.
- We need to put the 45-inch curved OLED up against something else to see what it can do. Now, the Xeneon is different, from its flexible panel to its size, so we can only really compare it to something else.
- So we got some results from 2K ultrawide monitors from Alienware, BenQ, ViewSonic, and MSI. Only one of these is an OLED (the Alienware 34 QD-OLED).
- Corsair Xeneon Flex monitor is cutting edge, and like many products still in development, it got firmware updates and other changes that affected some of our findings.
- Corsair did give us projected testing numbers where they were relevant, but we couldn’t confirm them at the time of the review.
- Now that that’s out of the way let’s take a closer look at the Corsair Xeneon Flex, with one big exception we’ll discuss in a moment.
- The deep OLED blacks helped the Corsair Xeneon Flex reach a brightness of 329 nits and a dynamic contrast ratio of 5,530:1.
- This is a considerable number. Corsair says the static contrast ratio is a sky-high 1,500,000:1, but the two differ.
Corsair Xeneon Flex: Gaming and Media
For competitive gamers, a monitor’s input lag and response time are the most important things. In short, input lag is the time it takes for a signal from a device like a keyboard or a mouse to show up on the screen. We use an HDFury Diva HDMI matrix(Opens in a new window) to find that number. The 240Hz screen lets you get high frame rates as far as your video card can go, and VRR, AMD FreeSync Premium, and Nvidia G-Sync Compatible keep the smooth image matter what brand of card you use.
No matter how tight the curve is pulled in, it doesn’t change the quality of the picture. Still, it’s hard to fall in love with this OLED when other gaming screens have input lag down to a science. What’s good? Corsair Xeneon Flex says that many of the problems mentioned here, such as the calibration right out of the box and the sound and smoothness of the mechanical hinges, should be fixed by the time the monitor comes out in the first quarter of 2023.
Verdict
In reality, this $1,999 bendable OLED is impressive, although it falls short in some ways and will probably be improved before it comes out. The monitor stands out in a crowded market for gaming displays because it can bend and flex in extraordinary ways. However, the jury is still out on how accurate and bright the colours are, and the input lag puts it in a class where some buyers will ignore it outright. If Corsair Xeneon Flex can show us a sample of the version that will be sold in 2023, we’ll make a final decision about this model.
