Portable monitors are getting more and more ubiquitous by the day – and we use them on a near daily basis. It’s an essential item to bring with me whenever I travel nowadays since it’s thin and also – as the name suggests – portable. And all I need to make it work is a single USB-C cable.
And this is the UPERFECT UGame K118 portable monitor. Is this the best portable monitor for gaming? It might be, honestly. It managed to surpass my expectations in many ways.
For this review, I highly suggest you watch this video as many things are better conveyed through video rather than text.
So let’s take a look at the box. It’s pretty simple and the contents are pretty much what we expect too. We have the monitor itself that we’ll talk about later, then we have a charger that can go 33W via USB-PD PPS and that’s surprising – and we can also convert this charger into a US two-prong plug too.
There are also 3 more cables included – we have two USB-C to USB-C cables, one for data and another for power. Then, there’s another HDMI to mini HDMI cable.
Okay, so this portable monitor is pretty simple in terms of the ports available. I mean, like cables we have, there are two USB-C ports and a mini HDMI port. There is another wheel/joystick thing that we’ll go through later. We also have an audio jack too.
Now, on to the best part. This is an 18-inch portable monitor screen with super thin bezels, and a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels – that means it’s a 16:10 aspect ratio. Pretty unusual, I’d say. What’s more unusual is the 144Hz refresh rate with variable refresh rate.
Of course, the gaming experience is amazing. I tried fast-paced games like Ghostrunner 2 on this portable monitor and I am just really surprised how it looks. Of course, these are all to be expected since it has already stated what it can do on the specs list.
What’s more surprising though, is the color accuracy. Now, for all portable monitors that we previously reviewed, they usually have less than 60% of sRGB color gamut coverage and very sub-par brightness.
But this one though – when I turn it on, the colors pop. It does show us a message of “insufficient power may cause flickering” and whatnot, but since we’re connected to the MacBook Pro, we can just make it go full brightness and wow, it’s really bright.
In default mode, our colorimeter reports around 423 nits of brightness and 99.93% of sRGB and 98.40% of DCI-P3 color gamut coverage! That’s impressive!
Now, there is another setting here called “PCM” which I have no idea what it is supposed to mean. Pulse code modulation? What does it have to do in the context of color gamuts? I changed it from the native PCM to sRGB PCM and the brightness dropped to 400 nits and it only covers 83.93% sRGB and 67.6% of DCI-P3 color gamuts. Hmmm…
But I eventually changed it to Adobe PCM because the native PCM is just too… saturated to the point that skin tones appear very red.
With that out of the way, how do we make this monitor stand? We can use the included flip case and prop it up in two angles by slotting the screen in these two cutouts. We can even flip the screen in 180° so that the cables on the other side, but I don’t advise you to do so since it can’t stand properly. However, we can use its included 75*75mm VESA mount. This is also surprising because portable monitors usually do not have VESA mount options.
Now let’s go back to the OSD menu. It’s really easy to control and the settings are pretty self-explanatory. I left everything in default other than the brightness, PCM option , and please remember to turn on the FreeSync option.
It’s always better to connect your own earphone or headphone to that 3.5mm audio jack or your gaming device directly – or any other devices, actually.
Should you buy the UPERFECT K118 portable gaming monitor?
So, this UPERFECT K118 portable gaming monitor is priced at $369.99 originally but I think they always go on a discount so snipe it when the time arrives.
UPERFECT also made some exclusive discount codes too – so use these two offer codes to get an even better deal.
TECHCRITTER30 –> $30 off for order amount above $200
TECHCRITTER50 –> $50 off for order amount above $400
