LG 24UD58-B 4K Monitor Review

We purchased the LG 24UD58-B 4K so our expert reviewer could thoroughly test and assess it. Keep reading for our full product review.

The LG 24UD58-B 24-inch 4K UHD Monitor is an excellent looking IPS panel with great viewing angles and sharp visuals. The clarity that 4K delivers on this LG is amazing, and it also makes upscaled 1080p content look super crisp as well. The 24UD58-B has vibrant color and advanced customization settings for color, brightness, and contrast. With a host of specific gaming modes, the 24UD58-B excels as a small to medium-sized desk monitor for a range of content, from streaming, to editing, to gaming. 

The 24UD58-B monitor features Freesync for smoother gameplay with AMD graphics processors and a response rate of 5ms, which is plenty fast to help reduce motion blur. This model also has 72% NTSC (99% sRGB) color space coverage, which makes the panel usable for professional design applications. 

Priced under $350, and often on sale for much less, this LED LCD monitor makes a budget-conscious investment into the world of UHD very appealing.

Design: Minimum space, maximum resolution

The 24UD58-B is a rather slim 24-inch panel with an even slimmer, minimal base that doesn't take up a lot of space on a desk. 

The bezels of the 24UD5-8 are more prominent than you will find on other IPS panels, but for a 4K monitor with Freesync at this price, the black plastic bezels are not a big deal. Three out of four bezels — top and sides — measure about a half inch wide, and although they do not sit completely flush with the screen, we hardly found them to be distracting. The bottom bezel is a bit thicker, measuring about 0.75 inches.

The bezels are made from shiny black plastic and the 24UD58-B's stand is made of this same material. The sides of the panel and the backside feature a matte plastic finish that is nice looking and almost has a fine grain appearance to it.

These subtle touches make for an attractively-designed panel. The LG's stand compliments these considerations with a wide-arc base. The footing of the stand feels stable and secure, measuring about 15.5 inches long and about nine inches deep, although most of that is 'open' space in a sense because the actual base is only about 2.5 inches wide around the curve. Although this gives the monitor a minimal look, the total desk space taken up by the stand could make a very small desk feel a bit cramped depending on the size of your keyboard.

The adjustability of the 24UD58-B is limited and the panel can only tilt about 30 degrees on its stand. There is no height adjustability or pivoting capabilities of the stand either. During our testing, we spent several hours editing video on the 24UD58-B and we feel the lack of adjustability can potentially hinder the use of this monitor as a workstation if you plan to be sitting for long hours. 

Having said this, the 24UD58-B is VESA compatible, which makes the possibility of a wall-mounted arm or third-party stand a viable solution for anyone who wants to set up a custom workstation. Using a mount can also free up desk space for gaming if you have a small desk. 

This LG monitor has three total inputs, including two HDMI ports and one DisplayPort. There is also a ⅛-inch audio pass-through connection on the back of the panel. All the ports are still easily accessible with a VESA mount.

Setup Process: Hassle-free

The assembly of the 24UD58-B is simple and straightforward. The stand arm of the LG's base attaches to the wide-arc footing with a single flat head screw (included). This screw has a foldable clasp on it that makes it easy to tighten without any tools (though a quick turn with a flat head screwdriver makes it that much more secure). 

The panel attaches to the stand arm with two Phillips head screws (included) which you will need a screwdriver for. The 24UD58-B comes with a couple of plastic covers that you can snap onto the top and bottom of the stand arm to disguise the joints where they connect with the panel and base. These give the LG's base a seamless look. 

A third tiny plastic component also snaps onto the back of the stand arm to hold the power cable and HDMI or DisplayPort cables neatly in place. In total, we spent less than ten minutes unboxing it, fetching a screwdriver, and assembling the 24UD58-B.

Image Quality: Ultra high definition with ultra-wide angles

The image quality of the LG 24UD58-B monitor is quite amazing. It has impressive sharpness, vibrant color, and looks simply great from all angles thanks to the panel’s in-plane switching technology (IPS). 

IPS monitors typically have wider viewing angles than other types of LCD monitors, and you can accurately view and experience the 24UD58-B display from 178 degrees without visible distortion or any color washing. This, combined with the panel's clear and crisp resolution, makes this LG monitor a great choice for watching 4K movies or gaming with friends. 

One downside of most all IPS panels is the inevitable presence of some amount of light bleed. Certain online reports claim that this can be an issue on the 24UD58-B when watching the monitor in a dark environment. 

“Light bleed” usually refers to a glow of whitish light around the edges of a backlit-LED LCD display. While testing the 24UD58-8, we found it to have a medium to moderate amount of light bleed in a dark room—it’s not terrible, but it is present and can get better or worse depending on how bright the images are onscreen. The 24UD58-8 does have various 'black stabilizer' settings plus adjustable contrast and brightness settings that can help solve this problem. 

The 24UD58-B has 4K resolution (3840 x 2160 pixels) and creates beyond-stellar visuals, even though this is considered an entry-level 4K monitor. 

4K resolution, which gets its moniker from the almost 4,000 horizontal pixels present in consumer-grade Ultra-high-definition panels like this one, has four times the resolution of full HD (1920x1080). You can easily get very close to this panel and still be impressed with the intense clarity. 

One thing that gamers should be aware of with the 24UD58-B is that it does not support HDR (high dynamic range) game modes. HDR helps boost contrast and brightness levels while also pushing the color range within a game's graphics, so it’s becoming trendier in the world of gaming. If you are an Xbox One X or PS4 Pro user—or if you were hoping to use your 4K BlueRay player with HDR on the 24UD58-B—you're out of luck. You can still hook those machines up and get 4K resolution, but it won't support HDR.

Despite this, native 4K content still looks dazzling and even 1080 content looks great. This monitor’s ability to upscale 1080p content to 4K is also a big plus for designers and editors who may want to work on native 1080p content in very close detail.

The awesome clarity of the 24UD58-B is delivered in part by a small pixel pitch of 0.14 x 0.14 mm. Pixel-pitch is the exact measurement of the center of one pixel to the center of an adjacent pixel. This pixel-pitch translates to a pixel density of 185 pixels per inch (PPI) for the 24UD58-B.

The 24UD58-B has an impressive level of color variation that approaches higher-tier LCP model specs. It utilizes a 30-bit color display, which makes it capable of showing over one billion colors. It also has a 72% NTSC color space coverage which translates to 99% sRGB coverage, which is what you should expect from a high-resolution display like this.

Software: An easy-to-navigate on-screen display

Unlike most on-screen displays, the menu navigation on the 24UD58-B is actually quite helpful and makes it easy to find your way around its various modes. 

The power button serves as the singular button with which to navigate the OSD. It’s located on the bottom edge of the panel and resembles the now-old-school mouse pad nodules that early laptops used to have in the center of their keyboards. This nodule button serves its purpose well with the 24UD58-B and makes it simple to scroll and select various settings.

The on-screen display has advanced settings for color, brightness, and contrast, so you can tweak the picture to your own liking. The OSD has two shortcuts so you can quickly switch to the game modes, as well as some shortcuts for the general image settings. These presets include Reader, Photo, Cinema, Dark Room, and Game Modes. There's also a handy reset option which allows you to quickly put the settings back to the factory default.

The are several more advanced settings you can go into to further optimize the 24UD58-B for a variety of uses, including specific game modes for first-person shooter games (FPS 1, FPS 2), real-time strategy play (RTS), and custom settings. 

The monitor has adjustable levels for things like response time, black stabilizer and enabling/disabling Freesync (more on that later). The advanced color adjust menu has settings for gamma, color temperature, and sliding controls for red, green, and blue color settings. There are also advanced six color settings for hue and saturation of red, green, blue, yellow, magenta, cyan. Again, if you have tweaked a bunch of settings and want to go back to the factory default, there is a reset option in each menu as well as a 'master reset’ in the main menu.

You can also install LG's “Onscreen Control” from the included software CD in order to utilize Picture-in-Picture mode. With Onscreen Control properly installed on your computer, you can use what LG calls Screen Split 2.0, which allows you to display all three inputs of the 24UD58-B at the same time on the monitor.

Refresh Rate: Defaults to 30Hz but it’s capable of more

The refresh rate is the speed at which the monitor will update the display with new image frames and is measured in cycles per second (Hz). For those using the HDMI input on the 24UD58-B: straight out of the box, this monitor will come preset with a refresh rate of 30Hz at 3840 x 2160. 

We think this is because HDMI 2.0—which supports 4K resolution at 60hz—is not supported by some older devices. But 4K will often work for those older devices while running at 30Hz. To enable the HDMI 2.0 input and run games at 60hz with the full ultra-high definition that the 24UD58-B can deliver, you need to go into the settings and select Deep Color Mode. This setting will get you on the higher 60Hz refresh rate for 4K.

Freesync: Smoother gameplay with AMD GPUs

The 24UD58-B specifically features Freesync with the avid gamer in mind. Freesync is a hardware system standard that was developed by the hardware and processor manufacturing company AMD. Its essential function is to help ensure smoother gameplay by synchronizing the graphics frame rate processing and the monitor's refresh rate.

Enabling Freesync on the 24UD58-B will only work if you have a computer that also has an AMD graphics processor (GPU). Freesync will also only work on the 24UD58-B with the DisplayPort connection cable (included) because it uses adaptive synchronization technology that is a part of the DisplayPort Standard. 

This synchronization solves two specific problems for gaming: screen tearing and lag.

Screen tearing is a term for a visual and computational phenomenal that happens when a monitor gets fed multiple image frames right as the display is trying to refresh the onscreen image. As an example, the LG 24UD58-B has a refresh rate of 60Hz, or 60 frames per second, so if your computer began force-feeding 70 or 80 more frames per second to the monitor without Freesync enabled, the 24UD58-B would experience screen tearing, where the visuals appear sliced and inconsistent onscreen. Although this phenomenon happens in milliseconds, gamers can still notice this on many popular games.

The opposite phenomena, input lag, can also present a problem for gaming. Lag happens when your monitor has to wait for your GPU to provide the next frames, causing visual stuttering or jumping. Input lag tends to happen during the most intense moments of gaming with a lot of action onscreen—the last time you want any kind of stutter in your play.

Freesync is a solution to both these problems. It establishes a dynamic refresh rate between the 24UD58-B and your AMD GPU—on this LG monitor, it works within a fresh rate range of 40-60Hz. Freesynsc's variable refresh rate technology will allow the monitor and the graphics card to continuously communicate with each other while you play, syncing up the graphics card and the monitor’s refresh rate so your games look as clean and smooth as they should. 

Price: A steal for under $250

The LG 24UD58-B 24-inch 4K monitor has an MSRP of $349.99 but can often be found for a discounted price under $250 at most major retailers online. 

$250 or less is an excellent price for an entry-level 4K monitor. The incredible sharpness, vibrant color, and special features like Freesync make the 24UD58-B a heck of a deal for anything under $350.

LG 24UD58-B vs. Philips 276E8VJSB 

Shopping for a 4K monitor (or any new LCD monitor, for that matter) can sometimes be an overwhelming experience. There are many options and different specs to consider. A direct price-point competitor to the LG 24UD58-B is the Philips 276E8VJSB, a 27-inch 4K UHD IPS Monitor. 

The 276E8VJSB has an MSRP of $279.99 but can often be found on sale, much like the LG model we reviewed. As of the time of this writing, the Philips is selling for about $250 online, so they’re almost exactly the same price.

The 276E8VJSB has some very similar picture quality specs to the LG. It features the same 4K UHD resolution of 3840 x 2160, similar wide viewing angles, the ability to display over one billion colors, the same configuration of DisplayPort and HDMI ports, and the same 5ms response time and 60Hz refresh rate.

The main difference between the LG and Philips is twofold—the Philips does not feature Freesync for gaming, but it does have much thinner bezels than the 24UD58-B. If gaming isn't much your style but you’re interested in a budget-priced 4K IPS panel for watching native 4K content and 4K movies, then the slim, attractive and very clean-edged display of the 276E8VJSB panel may be of interest to you.

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