LG Ergo Dual 27QP88D-B2 review: A surprisingly affordable dual-monitor package

LG is known for making monitors that come with an ergonomic arm mount instead of a traditional stand, for increased adjustability without the desktop footprint. The Ergo Dual simply increases the number of monitors per arm mount: shipping with two 27in IPS panels and a single, beefy ergonomic arm, this monitor package is a gravity-defying stunt that hopes to maximise screen real estate while minimising desk clutter.

As you can imagine, this makes for one seriously big and weighty contraption. And while there are plenty of positives to note here – value for money being chief among them – I’d be remiss not to state the obvious: it’s complicated to set up and shouldn’t be tackled if you find assembling flat pack furniture a challenge.

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LG Ergo Dual 27QP88D-B2 review: What do you get for the money?

The LG Ergo Dual costs £550. That gets you two 27in IPS displays, each with a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440, a refresh rate of 60Hz and a response time of 5ms G2G. There’s no adaptive sync or HDR support here.

These twin monitors have the same selection of ports. You’ve got two DP 1.4 ports (one upstream, one downstream) plus one HDMI 2.0 port and one USB-C 3.0 port for video duties. The upstream DP port can carry a video signal between monitors, creating a daisy chain so you don’t need to connect both to your PC or laptop. Then there are two USB-A 3.0 ports and a 3.5mm headphone jack per monitor to round things out.

The muscular arm keeping these two monitors aloft is capable of 150mm height adjustment, 335 degrees of horizontal swivel and 210mm of extension/retraction. Both monitors can also pivot 90 degrees into portrait mode, swivel 90 degrees in one direction (depending on the side), tilt forwards 30 degrees and backwards 35 degrees. In addition, you can rotate the bar on which the monitors are mounted by 90 degrees and stack them on top of one another, turning what is essentially a 5,120 x 1,440 (21:9) monitor into a 2,560 x 2,880 (16:18) one.

LG Ergo Dual 27QP88D-B2 review: What does it do well?

In many ways, the LG Ergo Dual is the most ergonomically friendly monitor I’ve ever tested. There’s no real need to labour the point here: the arm mount is clearly infinitely more adjustable than any basic stand, even with two 27in monitors strapped to it.

As well as the flexibility of the arm mount itself, both monitors are connected to a bar that, as you can see in the photo above, can be either horizontally or vertically aligned. This bar can extend/retract at both ends to make sure there’s minimal space between the panels where they meet. You can also lock the sliding section of the bar at specific intervals.

The monitors connect to this bar by way of ball-and-socket mounts and these allow the screens to swing 90 degrees in one direction, allowing you to position one monitor at a 90-degree angle to the other – useful if you’re working collaboratively or want to lend your second screen to another person.

The LG Ergo Dual uses daisy-chaining via DP to reduce cable clutter but there are still two power supplies and both monitors have the exact same port layout, so you could very easily wire a different laptop or PC to each monitor. The joint also rotates 90 degrees into portrait orientation, so you could have one monitor horizontal, one vertical, or both vertical.

The port roster is more than sufficient for most people. As well as carrying a video signal, the USB-C ports deliver 65W of power to connected devices, which is enough to charge most laptops. There’s a total of four USB-A ports, too, which is a very healthy number – although you will need to connect your laptop/PC to both USB-C ports if you want to use both sets.

LG has tried its hardest to keep the Ergo Dual as neat and unobtrusive as possible, and although this is still undeniably a huge piece of equipment, it’s not ugly. The matte black finish is plain and unfussy and the panels are both slim, measuring 45.4mm at their thickest point. Build quality is mostly good: the monitors themselves don’t creak or flex and the various adjustable elements move with minimal fuss.

The monitors themselves are surprisingly simple, which perhaps indicates how LG has kept the price down. But where it counts, the 27in IPS panels deliver and – crucially – they do so with minimal per-panel variation. Out of the box both panels produced just over 100% of the sRGB colour gamut: that’s 106.4% and 105.4% respectively, which equates to 75.4/74.7% DCI-P3 and 73.3/72.7% Adobe RGB. Tested against the sRGB colour gamut, both monitors returned average Delta E colour variance scores of around 1.2, which indicates that these monitors are colour-accurate to sRGB.

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Brightness and contrast are good enough for office use, at peaks of 390cd/m² and 1,025:1 respectively (those are average figures for both monitors combined but there’s very little variation). In their default modes both monitors returned good colour temperature measurements (around 6400K each) although other colour presets will produce noticeable red/blue tints, so I’d suggest sticking with the default unless you’re hoping to reduce blue light.

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LG Ergo Dual 27QP88D-B2 review: What could it do better?

Backlight uniformity is less impressive. As ever, this will vary from product to product, but the review sample I received exhibited a middling amount of variation on one of the two panels. It’s nothing damning, just a mildly dimmer section along the top-right edge but when you’re dealing with two supposedly identical monitors it’s a little frustrating.

My main concerns, however, are more practical in nature. As I’ve already explained, the LG Ergo Dual is a huge, unwieldy thing. It requires a good amount of DIY setup and, it’s hugely difficult to manhandle. I’ve built plenty of monitors in my time at Expert Reviews, but none caused me as much grief as the LG Ergo Dual.

You can see from our photos how challenging it is to line up the two monitors neatly: although the arm is pretty mighty, having two panels balanced at either end of a long bar is enough to make fine adjustments virtually impossible without a spirit level and a good amount of patience. It’s an inevitable downside to opting for a single point of connection as opposed to two arms joined at the base.

The size and weight of the arm, meanwhile, makes even clamping it to your desk a fiddly and strenuous process. You’ll need to break out a screwdriver for the multitude of screws, and I was dismayed to find that the casing that hides the join between arm and bar is brittle plastic that doesn’t sit flush. And of course, the screwdriver will have to be close at hand for when you want to swap from horizontal to vertical and vice versa. There’s no quick release mechanism.

I can appreciate that, in office environments, someone with experience might install the LG Ergo Dual but, even then, I worry that users will struggle daily with the sheer size and heft of the thing. It weighs 17kg with the stand attached and 23.5kg in the box, so don’t even think about dealing with it solo.

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LG Ergo Dual 27QP88D-B2 review: Should you buy it?

The LG Ergo Dual is an ambitious and often successful experiment in maximising screen real estate in a creative way. Both panels are perfectly good and, on paper at least, the design is more versatile even than an ultrawide monitor mounted on an ergonomic arm, such as the LG Ultrawide Ergo. Better still, you can pick up the LG Ergo Dual for a very tempting price.

My only reservation is that, in its pursuit of the ultimate ergonomic monitor, LG has neglected the user experience a little. That’s perhaps unavoidable but it’s frustrating all the same and enough to hold the Ergo Dual back from full recommendation. If you think you can cope with wrangling this monstrosity of a monitor package, then it’s certainly worth your money; just be aware that it’s an awkward thing to set up.

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