600hz is a number that means, almost nothing on it’s own. You know it’s smooth and that the screen updates very quickly, but 1/600th of a second on it’s own is meaningless with single frame from this 600hz monitor, only being shown for only 1.6 milliseconds, something that can’t even be recorded on video reliably.
I have a lot to say about this display, both good and bad, but I don’t want this fact to get lost in the details.
In terms of pure performance, isolated aiming potential, this is like nothing I’ve used before, and yes, I have tried 480hz OLED monitors. When looking at solely how clear motion is, this is unmatched and if you are a competitive esports player then this is the best you can get for those games.
But before talking about how zowie have pulled this off as well as the downsides to this monitor I want to go back a bit, because I’m sure a fair few people don’t believe that I can tell the difference between this and a lower refresh rate monitor.
Can you actually see 600hz?
I’ve heard the upper bound of human perception for refresh rate listed all over the place over the years and I get it, I’ve had the thought too: how can it possibly look any smoother, any clearer than 144hz, 240hz, 360hz? But it always can. And while the impacts of that increase do diminish as the refresh rate goes up, I haven’t found a point yet where it stops mattering, or where I can no longer tell them apart.
And I think the best way to prove that is to actually break down what a high refresh rate does to your aim and why it does what it does. You might have heard input lag or visual smoothness mentioned and while those things do matter, they are the first to lose their significance as you go above 240hz. I think it’s why some people think 240 to 360 isn’t noteworthy, the improvements to both of those areas get smaller and smaller. The reason why I disagree with those people is motion clarity, how sharp and crisp objects on the screen are while in motion.
How high refresh rate affects your aim.
The improvements to motion clarity going from 240 to 600hz helped for obvious stuff like spotting enemies when making a large turn or quickly identifying where someone was moving, but it also changed how I aim at a pretty fundamental level. With small corrections, you generally have to walk a very fine line between speed and control—they have to be fast but not too fast. There are multiple reasons as for why but one of the biggest ones for me was actually motion clarity. The faster you move your mouse, the more blurry the screen becomes so if you want to visually follow your target while making an adjustment, you had to be slow enough for them to still be visible through that blur.
On 240hz that was a fairly significant speed limiter for my corrections, at 360 less so and here? on this monitor it doesn’t apply at all.
No matter how fast I correct back I can always read my targets movements while I’m making my own. There is no blur.
Now just for clarity, this hasn’t unlocked some new untapped microadjustment speed potential for me, I still try to control the speed of my corrections for other reasons, but it is far less punishing if I make a mistake.
That’s a nice way to sum up the impact of refresh rates this high actually, less punishing. A similar effect can be seen when flicking as well. If you land the initial movement and click there’s almost no difference between 240hz and this but if you don’t land it it’s easier to correct for that error. On 600hz it’s trivial to keep track of the target’s position visually while making a flickshot because of how sharp they appear, compared to lower refresh rates where the blurring of the target would cause a bit of hesitation for me.
600hz vs 480hz OLED.
Now, this is comparing 600hz against a 240hz monitor, it’s no surprise it’s significantly better, so how does it stack up against the newest OLED offerings? Before trying this monitor out I thought that OLED motion clarity was unbeatable but comparing these two side by side… the sharper one is actually the Zowie. How is that even possible? Don’t OLED’s have zero ghosting because of their almost instant pixel response times? How can you get clearer than that?
Motion Clarity
Motion blur on screens doesn’t just come from the screen itself, it also comes from our eyes. We are used to seeing smooth motion as just that, smooth motion, but monitors don’t work that way. They can only display frames, one at a time, shown and held on the screen until the next appears. So, when we are trying to follow something on our monitor, our eyes will continue to predict its path even as the frame is held in place, creating some natural motion blur. Therefore motion blur reduction modes, in this case dyac2, were created to counteract this problem. They work by turning the screen off right after showing the image. This gives our eyes nothing to continually track, so that blur isn’t generated and when implemented at a refresh rate this high, the results speak for themselves. Photos of the monitor in use look like a still image.
Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a night and day difference when comparing against a high end OLED, but it is better. I especially noticed it in gunfights where I have to very quickly identify what “state” an enemy is in and adjust based on that info. This is why I prefer it in those esports titles: those games all run at 600fps or higher for me and at those framerates with dyac enabled, the experience this offers is genuinely unmatched. There’s a reason pro players are starting to use it as well, this implementation is much better than the other versions of similar tech I’ve tried and doesn’t decrease brightness or increase input lag noticeably for me.
However, since I mention OLED, I do need to mention how this monitor stacks up to that panel technology in other areas, and to cut to the chase:
In every other area, the Zowie loses. Badly.
Colours
Starting with the obvious, colours. To their credit, I was expecting it to be a LOT worse, I’ve used the older 2546k at a lan before and I remember the colours being terrible but this was… okay? About on par with some of the gaming focused IPS monitors that I’ve tried and a massive improvement over previous TN panels. It’s not entirely washed out or anything but looking at it next to the OLED… it’s not even close. This specific 600hz model actually has this colour film thing which is meant to make everything pop more as well, so this would be an even more unflattering comparison when looking at OLED vs any other Zowie monitor. And even with this colour film I actually had to swap back to the OLED when working on this video to colour correct some of the footage, I tried on the zowie but when checking it looked awful, it was completely wrong. There is no comparison between these two here.
Size, Resolution, and Design
On top of the Zowie being 24 inches, a pretty small form factor by modern standards, they’ve stuck to this kinda strange-looking design with massive bezels on the sides of the screen that just don’t look great to me. If sleeper pc builds are your thing then this is awesome, but to me it just looks like a monitor 20 years out of time.
Lets be honest though, no one is looking at this monitor for it’s colour accuracy or bezel design. People who are considering buying this are looking at it for it’s pure competitive gaming performance and so far it does seem to take the crown in that area. But, are there any games I’d still prefer to use an OLED for? Actually, yes!
I know esports players aren’t big fans of 1440p, some choosing to even go lower than 1080 and I get it, I played weird resolutions in csgo too, but for most games a higher resolution is more than worth the tradeoff in my opinion. When swapping between these two monitors in games like the finals or apex, I found it WAY easier to spot players on the OLED. I was looking at playermodels instead of clusters of pixels. And on top of that, reading those players movements was often easier too. When your screen space is being taken up with a gun model and ironsights and visual clutter, the few pixels 1080p offers of someones playermodel often isn’t enough to make out details like which direction their shoulder is tilted which is important for reading their movements.
The higher resolution of the OLED and the extra detail that offered was more than enough to offset the slightly worse motion clarity in those games.
Because motion clarity is only half the battle here, image clarity matters too and, past a certain point, will often matter more depending on the game you play. Finals and Apex are fairly middle of the pack for this, if I were still playing PUBG where those two pixels will kill me if I don’t see them, I’d much rather have a more coherent image to look at. And in games like this that depth of colour matters too, everything just pops and stands out from the background so much more and makes a genuine difference when trying to spot enemies in situations with a lot of visual clutter. When I listed those three games earlier, valorant, cs2 and overwatch; that was because they are the only games I think play better on on this monitor compared to the OLED. Siege probably does as well but I don’t play, I gave it a go and I wasn’t good enough to tell which I preferred so, sorry siege players.
And that’s not even talking about non fps titles:
I found myself gravitating away from the games I usually play in my free time because they just didn’t look as nice. And in turn, gravitating towards playing more ranked matches in whatever esports game because I knew that this was as good as it gets and the only thing holding me back was me…
I think your gut reaction to that statement acts as a good litmus test for if this monitor is for you or not. If it’s something like… “wow that sounds really motivating! Time to go grind Valorant!” Then this monitor probably is a good option. My reaction was more like, “oh my god swapping between these two monitors all the time is so annoying but I refuse to play Lies of P on a TN panel”, I’d go with the OLED. Because it is the best of both worlds, it has amazing image quality and amazing motion clarity, and unless you are a pro or trying to be one it will be MORE than good enough, and even if you are, the OLED won’t hold you back. But I did go into this thinking the OLED would just be better at everything and it’s not, if you are playing esports titles where you do get 600 fps and just want the best you can get for those games, the XL2586X+ is exactly that.
Closing thoughts
Now let’s take a step back for a moment. Both of these monitors cost one thousand united states dollars. Neither of them are a sensible purchase whatsoever for the vast majority of people, and even for the people in the niche they are each targeting… it’s pushing it.
Zowie is specifically looking towards esports players here, that is who this monitor is for and if you aren’t one or aspiring to be one, this shouldn’t be on your radar at all in my opinion, and even if you are it might be worth considering the cheaper 400hz option over this. The 1440p 480hz OLEDS are more well rounded and for me they are the perfect option but I still think 480hz is overkill for most. 360hz looks incredible already and the 4k 240hz OLEDS that are coming out now are also fantastic. This video and my analysis of both monitors was made with competitive players in mind who are looking at these in isolation from their price tags. You probably don’t need 360, 480, 600hz and you’d probably know if you did, for most people 240 is already more than enough.
I have two more things I want to talk about with this monitor but I couldn’t really relate this back to my main points and I don’t usually like talking about things I cannot explain or at least rationalize, but I think both are worth mentioning especially since the first is probably the reason why I don’t see myself maining this monitor. It, at least to me, only seems worth using with dyac2 and it’s a great piece of tech but whenever I use it for long periods of time I get the worst… motion sickness? I don’t know, at first it was only eye strain but I’d say after three to four hours I’d feel properly sick and have to lie down for a bit. I don’t think this is a massive knock against dyac2 because I’m the only person I’ve spoken to who experienced it to this level, but if I was competing still, I’d be playing for 6 to 8 hours a day at least and that isn’t doable for me on this. So, I’d have to turn off dyac and at that point, I’d take the OLED. Again though, I have no idea how common this is, I’ve heard that some eye strain is normal at first, others say that that this is standard and that it goes away with time but, it hasn’t so. Yeah.