Sony INZONE M10S Review – Truly Premium 480Hz OLED Gaming Monitor

This is Sony’s INZONE M10S, a genuinely premium gaming monitor. Sure, it’s premium thanks to its absolutely top-shelf specs – a 480Hz 1440p 27 inch W-OLED – but in the little touches that show careful thought, consideration and planning. Let me take you through this thing to show you the good, the very good, and the temperamental. First, a look around the thing. From the back you’ll find a sleek, minimalist style with a matte black coating on the metal backing of the panel itself, a reasonably thick ovular plastic backer housing the electronics, and an incredibly sleek stand. You’ve got the INZONE logo on the back, and that’s it for big, obvious branding. Hell, there isn’t even a Sony logo on the chinbar! It’s just plain, thin bezels all around. IO is three very well spaced USB 3 ports, along with the downlink port, and two HDMI 2.1 ports, along with one DisplayPort 2.1 port, and DC in from the Playstation powered power brick (it uses the same two pin plug the PlayStations use, unlike the usual three pin options that you’d imagine are safer, but whatever). 

The stand is also unlike any other. When I was unboxing it, I initially mistook the foot – the baseplate – for an attachable VESA mount, purely because it’s that small. The VESA mount is under the quick release mount, if you’re wondering, by the way. No, this tiny little disk is the foot, and amazingly, it isn’t all that unsteady. What’s even more unusual is that this stand has literally limitless swivel. Most monitors have like 45 degrees, maybe 60 or 90 at a push, but that’s all you get. This? This is just a giant thousand-pound fidget spinner. It’ll spin and spin until you rip your cables out. Why they opted to do it this way is completely unknown to me, and yet it’s weirdly cool. The rest of the adjustability is pretty normal, a decent amount of height and tilt control, and no rotation for portrait mode – although like I said there’s a VESA mount hidden back there (with the screws preinstalled no less) should you want to do something else with it. This stand is one of those little touches – so little surface area of your desk is covered up for an otherwise very stable and adjustable monitor. How premium… 

And speaking of premium little touches, the power LED on the side is excellent. It’s a nice little punch-out in the side, and being side mounted means it’s easy enough to glance at when needed, but it’s out of your way in normal use. Even the controls are a nice touch, sitting on a big, obvious, raised mound of plastic means you can very easily find it just by touch, and the joystick to control the menu feels really nice. It’s not loose like most of them are, it’s nice and clicky and the right amount of firm. Ok, one final example. I’m sure it’s a contractual obligation from NVIDIA to put a GSYNC sticker on any “G-Sync Compatible” monitor, and most would put it right on the chin bar – which is kind of obnoxious really. Sony? They tucked it neatly on the side of the stand. It’s there, it’s easy enough to find, but it’s not gaudy. It’s subtle, and kinda stylish. All these little touches – and more I won’t bore you with – add up to making me feel like this is legitimately a premium display. This feels like a cut above the rest – not just in specs, but in the execution. The details. Whether that matters enough to you to justify the price premium this commands even over the LG with the same (LG) panel is entirely up to you, but I thought it was worth mentioning as this is the first monitor I’ve actually stopped and admired for those sorts of little details.

Anyway, onto the stuff you probably care about the most, the panel, and the usage. First off I want to give one piece of information and advice to anyone with any of these Sony INZONE monitors that took me longer than I care to admit to figure out. These monitors are shipping in power saving mode. That limits this thin to what feels like 20 nits of peak brightness – just unusably dim – and just 60 hertz regardless of connection. You need to go into the menu, all the way to the bottom to the ‘other settings’ then disable power saving mode. Once you do that, the display comes to life, and you can set it to the full 480Hz this thing can offer. Do you need 480Hz? No, of course not. But does it look absolutely amazing on this thing, especially as an OLED with instant response times? Hell yeah! 

On the face of it, this thing looks amazing. It looks vibrant, bright, and sharp. Colours look incredibly vivid, and of course those beautifully deep blacks look amazing too. This feels like a newer generation of LG’s OLED technology than I’ve seen before. It’s brighter, more vibrant, and seems to be a little less harsh on text too. It’s still a W-OLED, meaning it has an RWBG pixel layout, so it isn’t quite as nice to text as QD-OLEDs, or even better IPS or VA panels with the more expected RGB layout, but this does feel like a step above other W-OLEDs I’ve seen for sure. This does have an adaptive brightness limiter, like all W-OLEDs, but unlike those others, this is configurable. There is a “Brightness Stabilizer” setting in the menu, which helps make the effects less obvious. By default the ABL is pretty aggressive. Look at the white area of the screen as I move the black window up and down. Basically, the larger the percentage of dark content on the screen, the brighter the bright areas can get, and the more bright, the darker the whole thing gets. To see that in graph form, I used my open source response time tool (available at OSRTT.com by the way, that’s linked in the description if you want one), and with the brightness stabiliser setting disabled you can see just how much it cuts back on brightness, going from the full brightness down to, at least according to the gamma data OSRTT captured, 46 RGB values less. This was meant to hit RGB 204, but at least on steady-state values you’ll get a peak at 204, then a drop to 158. That’s quite the drop. The other option is to enable the brightness stabiliser – on the “mid” setting it dims the peak brightness, to basically trim the ABL back. At RGB 204 again there is way less drop-off. Just 21 RGB levels now, instead of 46 with the mode off. It still takes 50 milliseconds or so to settle, but the dip is a lot less noticeable. You can still see it for sure, but it’s less obvious. On “High” at RGB 204 there is no overshoot – besides the single frame at the start OLEDs always seem to do. RGB 255 – what should be full white – does dip a tiny bit, but it’s pretty minimal so that’s not bad. The downside is a significant drop in peak brightness, regardless of screen content. It crushes the contrast – or in camera terms the dynamic range – which to be honest kind of sucks worse than the flicker/pulsing you get from the ABL on. I’d personally leave this off, or at most on “Mid”. 

I did check the response times, and as expected they are functionally instant. I also checked latency, and thanks to that 480Hz refresh rate it’s right at 1 millisecond on average. That’s the benefit of 480Hz versus, say 240Hz. There isn’t a perceptible smoothness difference, but there is a latency difference. It isn’t much, on average you’re waiting 2 milliseconds for a 240Hz panel to start displaying a new input (and up to 4 milliseconds), whereas the 480Hz panel it’s one millisecond (up to 2 milliseconds at most). Does that matter? No, not really. Is it still technically an advantage? Sure. Pro esports players might want this – and people who like to think of themselves as pro’s-in-waiting. Regardless of the technicalities, what I can tell you is that this is an absolutely, categorically, phenomenal gaming experience. It is smoother than your brain can handle, plenty sharp, vibrant, beautiful and so goddamn fast. It moves faster than you can really keep track of, and that’s kind of the aim of gaming products – make it so good you are the only limitation. That’s what this does, it is so good you are the only bottleneck in your own gaming experience. I can’t really think of a way to improve this, besides maybe more brightness and less ABL, but otherwise… It’s perfect.

Speaking of brightness, I did use the SpyderX2 to check what it can do, and at least in SDR you’ll get between 300 nits with 50% of the screen bright and around 450 nits with a ninth of the screen lit. Supposedly full screen white brightness is around 250 nits, although that’s kind of rare so at 100 percent brightness you’re looking at between 300 and 450 give or take, which is a step up above the other OLEDs I’ve tested (both QD and W). It’s still not IPS or VA levels, but still. The colour gamut coverage is great, 97 percent of DCI P3, and I’d consider the colour accuracy results suspect here as the SpyderX2 isn’t great with W-OLEDs and their RWBG pixel layout. Other sites like RTINGS report it as pretty good out of the box, and I’m inclined to believe them. It’d be great if Sony included a colour calibration report in the box like AOC do for their AGON panels, that’d be a really nice and further premium touch. 

The biggest catch, as you might expect, is that this thing costs £1,100 as of filming. LG’s UltraGear 27GX790A-B is £730 on their own site or £800 on Amazon, and even Asus’ PG27AQDP is around £950, so this commands a potentially hefty price premium over what are at least on the face of it pretty comparable monitors. Whether or not the more premium body, stand, and little details means you are willing to part with over a thousand of your hard-earned pounds, instead of up to £350 less, is entirely up to you. I don’t know I could, especially because I’m still very much in love with my EVNIA 8600 ultrawide, but still. This is an amazing, and amazingly premium, display that if you can justify the price I know you’ll love too.