Introduction

In August 2022, Corsair demonstrated an interesting conceptual monitor, equipped with a gigantic 45-inch ultrawide OLED panel, which was bendable. The idea was to allow users to decide for themselves whether they'll use a completely flat screen, which some prefer when working with professional tools, or give it an arbitrary radius of curvature, to fill out their field of vision as much as possible for added immersion while gaming or watching video.



Not long after the premiere, Xeneon FLEX, as the aforementioned monitor was named, came to life as a commercially available product. It is, therefore, a product that can be purchased today by anyone willing to separate from $2,000, which is its current price. The Xeneon FLEX 45WQHD240 is by far the most extravagant monitor sold by Corsair, and currently the only such monitor on the market. LG offers an OLED screen with a bendable screen, the 42 OLED Flex, but it has a 42 inch screen diagonal and it is in fact a TV. There's also the LG 45GR95QE-B, which uses the same panel like the Corsair Xeneon FLEX, but with a fixed 800R curvature. Aside from the Xeneon FLEX, Corsair's Xeneon monitor lineup consists of a more "ordinary" 27-inch OLED monitor, the Xeneon 27QHD240 (reviewed here), as well as four LCD monitors with IPS panels.

I've been daily-driving the Xeneon FLEX for over two months, during which it went through several significant firmware updates. My usage consists of 90% office work (Word, Excel, Chrome, DaVinci Resolve, Photoshop, Lightroom) and 10% gaming. Such a use case theoretically isn't ideal for an OLED monitor due to potential burn-in, especially when you take into consideration that I didn't bother taking the usual precautions, such as setting the Windows taskbar on auto-hide. I strongly believe you shouldn't be a hostage of your monitor when dishing out a serious amount of money for a high-end OLED model, in the sense that the monitor itself shouldn't force you to use the operating system or apps in ways you don't find intuitive. Having said that, in this review, we'll also look for signs of burn-in and try to figure out if a modern OLED panel is a viable choice for productivity-heavy workflow – at least in terms of image retention.

Specifications