Hi there All,
So I am in no way a reviewer and I certainly have not done anything like this before so forgive me. I’m not even sure I will add in pictures to this review.
I ordered my spectrum last August from the USA and finalized my payment with Express shipping. I was excited to receive a shipping notification fairly quickly and was excited to see my delivery turned up early. As soon as Spectrum was delivered to my front door I was concerned as the outer brown box had a chuck taken off the top of it and had broken the tape even however as soon as i opened the box the inside black pbox containing the monitor did not have a scratch on it.
The packaging that Spectrum arrived in was super protective and did a great job keeping the monitor secure and it took me a few minutes trying to work out how to get to the power adapter and power cable! this is a good thing as it shows the packaging really did its job.
My main computer is a homebuilt AMD Ryzen 7 3700x with 32 Gb T-force Xtreem ARGB Ram. I recently (luckily) managed to obtain an EVGA 3080 last week so this computers had quite an upgrade visually from my old Vizio 3dtv at 60hz so I appreciate that visually ANYTHING was going to be an improvement from what I had.
Immediately when I turned on the monitor I knew that this was special and that I was going to have a good experience. My monitor was immediately detected on my main computer and this was fantastic. I fired up Fallout 76 at 4k and was very impressed and to get a more visually pleasing game I decided to fire up Hell let loose and test out the FPS at 4K. Spectrum performed amazingly and I didnt think things could get any better! In my complete noobness what I failed to realize that HDR had to be turned on through windows (I was trying to find the settings in the monitor itself because hey I was running on an old TV before). By the time I figured this out it was 2am and this guy needed to work the next day (I did manage to check out the https://www.youtube.com/c/TheHDRChannel I suggest everyone does this)
The next day everything was connected to my laptop (HP Probook 640 G4) for work (I had tested everything out the night before but I had my main PC turned on … IMPORTANT!). I turned on spectrum to receive the message signal not found when connected. Long story short this is where the problems arise for me. I tried connecting Spectrum directly to my laptop via HDMI, I tried connecting via Displayport on the dock I have (D9Y32AA) and spectrum will not detect a signal. So after much testing after work for a few days this is what I have discovered…
Spectrum can only detect signal from my laptop if my main computer is connected via HDMI 1 firstly and then I manually select HDMI 2. I can even shut down my main computer afterwards and Spectrum still behaves fine connected via HDMI 2. If I try this same workaround for displayport it will NOT work. However I have tested my displayport 1.4 cable and Spectrums displayport and connecting to my main computer … Signal is perfect no problems arising at all and everything functioning as it should. So displayport is fine and second HDMI port is working perfectly too. I suspect this (hopefully) will be fixed with a firmware update but I can confirm the update to firmware 102 did not fix this. I have been in touch with customer service to advise them of my experience.
Now getting back to the turning on HDR on my main computer for gaming has been mighty impressive. I am actually blown away by how awesome everything looks. I didnt expect Hell Let Loose to look much better in HDR but boy was I wrong! I havent tried out any movies yet but as the weekend is coming up I’m sure I’ll get more hands on testing.
Bottom line is this I really have no regrets getting the Eve Spectrum at all I know its been a long wait coming but its been worth it for me. I know that the Laptop signal for me is a huge pain right now but at least I have figured out a workaround for the time being and I hope this can be fixed for the future. I understand that this is a new product and that I was going to possibly expect some bugs at first but overall my experience has been fantastic!