[This review was collected as part of a promotion.] Using a 24" monitor whilst working from home the past two years, I’ve been considering sizing up recently. So when I heard about the LG DualUp and it’s unusual 16:18 ratio (essentially two 16:9 monitors one atop the other) I was intrigued.
Firstly, the monitor doesn’t come with a conventional stand. LG includes the Ergo stand in the box, allowing for a large range of movement of the monitor on the arm, and it’s very easy to adjust. The Ergo stand fit easily to my desk with the included C-clamp, as easy as turning a single screw. The monitor then attached to the arm simply by clipping it onto the end, extremely easy setup.
The monitor comes with a wealth of inputs: 2x HDMI, 1 DP and 1 USB-C. The USB-C post allows for 90W of power delivery as well as data transmission so allowed me to connect and power my laptop with a single cable.
I was surprised to see that my work laptop and PC handled the odd resolution (2560 x 2880, essentially two 21.5” 1440p screens) out the box with no additional software. I work with a lot of spreadsheets with my job, and this high resolution allowed me to zoom out quite far whilst still being able to read the contents, which allowed me to get a lot of info on screen without the need to scroll. The sheer height of the screen though did require me to look up and down though, which does feel odd to do.
However, other workstreams like PowerPoint don’t work as well with the portrait mode, with applications over years being built for landscape screens and wasting a lot of real estate on the squarish screen. The Windows snap system does not allow for snapping to the top and bottom half of the screen to allow for better multi-window work. There is some LG software available to help with this, but I can’t install this on my work laptop.
Photo editing worked well, especially with the high colour gamut and ambient brightness features of the screen allowing a massive canvas to edit photos, especially portrait photos.
Gaming doesn’t fare quite as well, with many games not supporting the odd resolution. Many games; on screen icons looked stretched and distorted, or disappeared off the side of the screen completely. Others letterboxed the game in the middle of the screen, which ended up I had a smaller usable screen than my old 24” monitor.
Overall, this is a good quality monitor, with plenty of high end features. However it is certainly more useful in certain cases than others.