Get the 42-inch or 48-inch LG C2 OLED for £999

The LG C2 OLED probably isn’t your first thought when you’re considering a new desktop monitor, but its incredible image quality and new smaller 42-inch or 48-inc sizes make it a surprisingly valid choice. Right now you can pick up this monitor in either size for under £1000, depending on where you shop, a price that puts it make more affordable than smaller monitors with worse HDR performance – and that makes it well worth considering.

There are three options here: the 42-inch model is £949 at Amazon UK or £999 at John Lewis – where you can a free LG SN4 Bluetooth soundbar and wireless subwoofer if you use the code LGSN4 at checkout. Finally, you can also get the 48-inch model for £999 at Box, with the bigger screen working better at a larger viewing distance.

So why the LG C2 OLED in the first place? Over at Digital Foundry, it’s one of our top gaming TV recommendations, alongside the outgoing LG C1, thanks to its full complement of gaming features: a 4K 120Hz panel, G-Sync and FreeSync support, Black Frame Insertion (at 60Hz), extremely low input lag and perfect pixel response times. Of course, you get all of the usual OLED benefits as well, like perfect blacks, vibrant colors and super-impactful HDR that 99% of gaming monitors can only dream of.

There are some negatives too – the giant size means you have to sit fairly far back, you’ll need a bigger 200×200 VESA mount to have it on a monitor arm, an automatic brightness limiter that means that full-screen bright scenes are noticeably dimmer than bright highlights, and there’s the potential for permanent image retention if you leave the same image on-screen for too long. However, modern OLEDs like the C2 have some effective countermeasures against image retention, and you should be fine if you take some commonsense measures like auto-hiding the taskbar and having a screensaver – there’s even a £90 ‘Protect Plus’ accidental damage cover available at John Lewis that covers you against this if you wish.

All in all, the C2 is a crazy-good desktop monitor compared to what you can get in the more traditional PC monitor space, offering significantly better HDR and some unique OLED-only characteristics like those perfect blacks and near-instant pixel response times, so they’re well worth considering at these discounted prices. Of course, they are a doubly fantastic choice if you like to keep a games console like a PS5 or Series X hooked up to your monitor too.

If you have any questions, do let me know, and thanks for joining me on this one!