I’ve reviewed quite a lot of hardware for Windows Central at this point, including monitors. While the super-expensive, high-end gaming monitors are always a blast to use, there’s only one monitor I would choose for my personal setup that fits within my budget: the HP OMEN 27qs. It’s one of my highest-rated monitors I’ve reviewed so far, and I consider it to be an excellent value even at full price. For a limited time, that price has been considerably knocked down.
More great early Black Friday deals
The best way to obtain 240Hz gaming without breaking the bank
Let me just quickly break down the specs of the HP OMEN 27qs: It’s a 27-inch, IPS LCD display with a crisp QHD 1440p resolution and an incredibly fast 240Hz refresh rate. Its other gaming props include a quick 1ms response time, supports AMD FreeSync Pro Premium (and is NVIDIA G-Sync compatible), and gets bright enough for any office or gaming setup. For a retail price of $430, it’s a well-balanced and well-designed monitor that more than deserves the asking price.
I genuinely loved using this monitor while reviewing it. In fact, this is the monitor I would buy for myself if I needed one, as it perfectly matches my budget and desired feature list. The display is colorful and vivid and is guaranteed to make your games look great, the anti-glare coating is wonderful for combating nasty reflections, and the physical monitor itself is smartly designed to be dead simple to put together, easy to tweak to your setup (including full vertical support for multi-monitor setups), and modern looking with slim bezels and tasteful RGB lighting.
If you want to experience high-framerate gaming at up to 1440p and 240Hz, I genuinely don’t think there’s a more balanced mid-range gaming monitor on the market. HP did a brilliant job with the OMEN 27qs, ensuring that it made compromises where necessary to keep costs down while still delivering excellent gaming performance.
This monitor only really has three cons in my eyes, and the gravity of those cons will depend on your needs: contrast is just average for an IPS LCD monitor (which is already going to be below any decent OLED or miniLED display), HDR support is here but basically negligible, and the integrated speakers get loud but simply don’t sound very good. The monitor still looks very good without top-notch contrast or HDR support, so it never bothered me much while gaming. The speakers were disappointing, but most gaming monitors don’t have speakers anyways (and you should probably be using one of the best PC gaming headsets).
In my HP OMEN 27qs review, I concluded that it’s “a fantastic monitor with great picture quality, flawless gaming performance, and an attractive design that isn’t too loud.” The HP OMEN 27qs is one of the best gaming monitors at $430, and this deal makes it an unbelievable value. It’s discounted by over 30% as part of an early Black Friday 2023 deal, shaving off a staggering $120 to make it just $299.99 at Best Buy. Honestly, that deal is so good it might be worth buying two for a multi-monitor setup. That’s what I would do, at least.
