Corsair Xeneon Flex 45WQHD240 review: Bend me, shape me, anyway you want me
Corsair’s new 45in OLED gaming monitor has a trick up its sleeve: you can bend it from flat to 800R
Pros
- Flat or curved? Why not both?
- Excellent motion handling
- Bright (with Brightness Stabiliser off) and accurate
Cons
- Pixel density is low
- No speakers and no KVM support
- The stand has minimal adjustment
Having a bendy monitor is not something the majority of people have ever considered. But the idea shows more merit the more deeply you think about it: a curved monitor is perfect for immersive gaming but less for creative activities or office work where you need content to be square on. Whether or not you prefer a curved display for watching movies is a matter of taste, but it’s great to have the option to watch in either format.
Corsair’s Xeneon Flex 45WQHD240 seeks to offer you the best of both worlds. You can use the 3,440 x 1,440 OLED panel flat for work or curved to 800R (most easily visualised as a 1m segment of a circle with a circumference of 5m) for highly immersive gaming.
Corsair Xeneon Flex 45WQHD240 review: What do you get for the money?
It should go without saying that this sort of innovation doesn’t come cheap; the Xeneon Flex will set you back £2,099. That princely sum gets you a 45in ultrawide OLED monitor with a resolution of 3,440 x 1,440, a refresh rate of 240Hz, a maximum curvature of 800R and a quoted response time of 0.03ms G2G. The Flex supports both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync and is HDR10-compliant, although as it’s an OLED it has no official Vesa DisplayHDR certification.
The Flex’s party piece is obviously the bending screen. The OLED panel isn’t attached to two articulated arms that are, in turn, attached to the stand. On either side of the panel on the end of the arms are two retractable handles with buttons on them that lock them in place. Unlock them and pull them out, then take a firm hold and pull them out and towards you to make the screen bend.
There is some resistance but not enough to cause any worry about something going “snap”, and the end-stop is obvious enough that you don’t worry about over-extending the system. Once in position, you can push the handles back into their slots.
To move back from curved to flat, you simply repeat the process but push back rather than pull out. It’s all surprisingly simple and drama-free. If you fancy a more gentle curve than 800R you can leave the panel in any position between the maximum curve and flat.
The process takes more effort than the LG OLED evo Flex 42 (ironically, the OLED panel used in the Flex is made by LG), which has a motorised curving mechanism, can bend to 900R and has a 4K resolution. But the LG costs almost £3,000 and only has a 100Hz refresh rate.
If you are worried about longevity, you probably don’t need to be. According to Corsair, each Flex is good for at least 10,000 bends which is equal to three every day for just over 9 years. You also get a three-year warranty for mechanical issues, dead pixels and burn-in. When you put the Flex into standby mode, it runs pixel orbiting and pixel refresh routines to maintain the panel’s health.
One thing worth mentioning is that my review unit never went back to absolutely flat, there was always a very slight amount of waviness to be seen looking along the top edge. I can’t regard this as an issue because the slight deformation is imperceptible when you are sitting in front of the screen.
The stand is a large and imposing affair that is permanently attached to the screen – only the wide, V-shaped foot comes away. There’s minimal adjustability, just a tilt option between -5 and +17 degrees. I assume this is because the stand needs to be fixed square-on for the telescopic arms on which the panel is mounted so as not to turn or twist when the screen is being adjusted.
READ NEXT: The best monitors to buy
Corsair Xeneon Flex 45WQHD240 review: What type of connections does it have?
All the I/O ports are built into the stand rather than the cabinet, which is a rather unusual but also rather effective layout. On the back of the stand are two HDMI 2.1 and one DisplayPort 1.4 video inputs, two Type-C ports, one for upstream data and one for DP Alt Mode video input with 30W DP charging, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 downstream ports and the power jack.
On the front of the stand are another two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports and a 3.5mm audio jack. Alongside these, you will find the on/off button, input selector and toggle to control the OSD menu system. Reaching under the monitor to access the menu system isn’t entirely a comfortable manoeuvre, but it’s better than having to reach around the side of the cabinet.
Having two front-facing (or side-facing) USB ports should be a legal requirement for all monitors with a hub.
READ NEXT: The best gaming monitors to buy
Corsair Xeneon Flex 45WQHD240 review: How good is the image quality?
The first order of business after you get the Flex out of the box is to turn off the Brightness Stabiliser. This prevents the display from adjusting the brightness depending on how big or small a white image is being rendered, but it makes the entire display very dim indeed, so much so that I thought my review unit was on the fritz.
Once disengaged, the Flex starts to shine (quite literally). Maximum SDR brightness came in at a solid 415cd/m² (switching to sRGB mode knocked that down to 385cd/m², which was less of a drop than I expected), while peak HDR brightness from a screen area <10% peaked at 872cd/m². That second figure is shy of the 1,000cd/m² that Corsair claims but not by enough to matter or rule out being down to my testing methodology and equipment.
OLED panels seldom disappoint when it comes to colour, and the Flex is no exception supporting gamut volumes of 138% sRGB, 97.5% DCI-P3 and 94.9 Adobe RGB. Switching on the sRGB clamp and measuring the average Delta E variance returned an imposing score of just 0.9, meaning colour accuracy is effectively perfect.
When I ran a uniformity check, the Delta E did go rather askew on the far right of the panel. It wasn’t catastrophic and was limited to the rightmost 20%, but it does suggest that flexibility and ultimate accuracy are not the best bedfellows.
The Xeneon Flex lacks any HDR certificate beyond the basic HDR10, but thanks to 10-bit colour and an effectively infinite contrast ratio, content looks very impressive in either mode though the Windows desktop looked rather washed out, suggesting that the HDR colour balance could use some fine-tuning though it’s nothing I couldn’t live with.
The panel has a slight matte, non-glare finish to it. It’s so slight I’m not sure I’d actually describe it as matte. I’m a firm fan of full gloss finishes on OLED displays but had no issues with the finish on the Flex.
Motion handling is impeccable thanks to a 240Hz refresh rate and quoted 0.03ms GtG response time. Running the Blur Busters UFO test, there was no ghosting or smearing to be seen. Judged from a pure gaming point of view, the Xeneon Flex is a superb performer though it does lack some core gaming features like a black boost or frame rate counter. All you get is a basic crosshair.
If there’s one major drawback to this panel, it’s that the 3,440 x 1,440 resolution is not exactly high for a 45in display. The resultant pixel density is just 83dpi. To put that into context, a 1080p 16in display would give you 138dpi, and a 720p 16in display, 91.8dpi. To avoid text looking quite obviously pixelated, I found I needed to run Windows at 150% magnification or more, which for productivity uses, somewhat defeats the point of having a display this big to start with.
READ NEXT: The best budget gaming monitors to buy
Corsair Xeneon Flex 45WQHD240 review: Are there any other features you should know about?
It’s more a case here of what the Xeneon Flex lacks. Firstly there are no speakers. Some of you won’t care because if you’re spending this sort of money on a monitor, you are probably planning on splashing out on a high-end speaker system, but that rather begs the question of why there isn’t an optical audio output.
Others will think that for this sort of money, installing a competent pair of loudspeakers shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man.
Looking at that list of I/O ports, I expected full KVM support, but that’s a feature the Flex lacks, so while you can look at two sources side-by-side or one inside the other, you can only interact with the one you select as the main input source in the OSD menu.
Another associated failing is that in PbP and PiP modes, the system renders all inputs in 21:9 format rather than automatically adjusting the aspect ratio to 10.5:9, so that each source gets as much screen real estate as possible. It’s all a bit half-baked for a monitor costing just over £2,000.
Something else you don’t get is a remote control: again, given the price of the Xeneon Flex, this seems a niggardly omission.
Corsair Xeneon Flex 45WQHD240 review: Should you buy it?
The Xeneon Flex is an innovative and impressive bit of kit, and the flexible display is much more than a gimmick. In the week I had it on my desk, I regularly adjusted it from flat to curved and then back depending on whether I was working, gaming, or watching a movie.
I didn’t find the rather low pixel density to be an issue, but if you plan on looking at large spreadsheets at 100% scale on a 45in screen, then a genuine 4K panel would probably be a better bet.
My only serious reservations are the absence of a decent KVM implementation and an optical audio output; given the plethora of ports and the asking price, they seem to be omissions that are hard to justify.