Dough Spectrum Black 32 review: I feel like a beta tester

Dough (formerly Eve) isn’t the first brand that comes to mind when you’re talking about the best gaming monitors. Infamously overambitious, the community-driven brand has found itself in hot water over the past few years with unfulfilled customer orders and a lack of communication with its community. The Spectrum Black 32, Dough’s second OLED display, is a monument to the next era of the company.

The days of strife seemed to have passed for Dough, with its monitors now available on Amazon and seemingly in the hands of customers.

The Spectrum Black 32 faces other problems, however. Despite showcasing promising features, a ton of customization options, and an envy-inducing third-gen WOLED panel, the Spectrum Black 32 still needs a lot of work before it can keep up with best OLED monitors on the market.

Dough Spectrum Black specs

Design

You could stack up the Dough Spectrum Black up against the Eve (Dough’s previous name) Spectrum from a few years ago and barely notice a difference in design. It’s a black rectangle, but that’s not a bad thing. Even with no branding and a minimal design, the Dough Spectrum Black feels premium, even more so than something like the MSI MPG321URX.

A big reason for that is the dark-gray finish that wraps around the back side of the monitor, which is constructed fully of metal. Like similar OLEDs I’ve reviewed, such as the Sony InZone M10S, the panel itself is very thin. Dough stuffs all of your connections and the guts of the monitor in a raised section at the back of the display. It’s completely out of view, which makes the monitor feel much thinner than it actually is when viewed from the front.

It’s a great-looking display, but the big thing that stands out from a design perspective is the stand. Dough doesn’t include a stand by default. You’ll need to spend an extra $99 to get the stand. It’s a nice stand, constructed fully of metal and with a cable routing channel through the center to keep your cable clutter at bay. But it’s an extra that you’ll have to pay for, while nearly every other monitor you can buy includes a stand in the box.

The lack of a stand by default could be good or bad depending on your situation. For starters, Dough only uses one stand. If you have a previous version of the Spectrum, you can swap over the stand. In addition, the stand mount uses a standard 100mm x 100mm VESA mount, so you can throw the monitor up on an arm if you want. If you already have a monitor arm, you’re saving money, and that’s great.

On the other hand, if you just want a monitor with all of the normal conveniences (like a stand), you’ll end up spending more than the competition. As someone who has several monitor arms I’ve acquired over the years, I ultimately like the decision to separate the stand out. However, it’s something you’ll need to keep in mind when shopping around if you have nothing to prop the Spectrum Black up on.

Features

If you’re wondering if the Dough Spectrum Black has a particular feature you might want, there’s a good chance the answer is yes. It’s packed to the brim with extras. The standout feature is the dual refresh rate, allowing you to switch between 4K at 240Hz and 1080p at 480Hz. Like the LG UltraGear Dual Mode OLED, there’s a dedicated button under the front lip of the monitor that changes between the two modes (you can rebind the command of this button, as well).

That’s the standout, but there’s a lot more here. For starters, you get Black Frame Insertion, or BFI. I’ve seen this feature before on monitors like the Asus ROG Swift 32 QD-OLED, which halves the refresh rate and inserts a black frame in between each refresh. You don’t actually see those black frames. Instead, you get more stable frames during each refresh.

If you’re, for example, playing games locked at 60 frames per second (fps) on a console, you’ll see motion blur between two frames. BFI provides better motion clarity by blacking out the screen between each frame so you don’t get any strange transitions where multiple frames show up on the screen at once. It’s a great feature for consoles, though you’ll have to significantly sacrifice the brightness of the display in order to use it.

In addition to BFI, Dough includes clamping for popular color spaces like DCI-P3 and AdobeRGB, as well as an anti-flicker setting for the variable refresh rate (VRR) in the display. The latter will raise the lower bound of the VRR range, preventing flicker on content running at a low frame rate. Finally, Dough supports two inputs at once, either through split screen or picture-in-picture mode.

My favorite feature is screen emulation, though. The Spectrum Black includes pixel-perfect scaling, and it allows you to emulate a 27-inch, 25-inch, or 21-inch monitor. That’s extremely useful for competitive gamers who are used to playing on a smaller 1080p display, especially considering the 480Hz refresh rate option.

Ports and menu

It’s rare to find a monitor with customization options, but that’s exactly what Dough offers with the Spectrum Black. You can pick up the monitor with or without a USB hub, and with different DisplayPort standards. Getting the barebones model will save you a lot of money compared to the competition, and all with the same image quality.

Without the USB hub, you’re getting a standard lineup of ports — two HDMI 2.1 connections and a DisplayPort 1.4 port. You’ll have to use the lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC) to achieve 4K at 240Hz, but that’s true of even much more expensive monitors packing this panel, such as the Asus ROG Swift PG32UCDP. If you want to turn off DSC at the cost of your refresh rate, you can.

This model, which is the most inexpensive at $900 for a matte coating and $1,100 for a glossy coating, doesn’t have any USB ports. It includes one USB-C connection, but that’s only for firmware updates. If you want USB ports, you’ll need to spend $1,300 for the highest-end configuration.

Dough makes the highest-end model worth the money. You’re getting the glossy Gorilla Glass coating, along with DisplayPort 2.1 so you can have the full resolution and refresh rate without DSC — newer OLED options like the HP Omen Transcend 32 are transitioning to DisplayPort 2.1, as well. More importantly, you get a total of four USB ports (two USB-C and two USB-A), along with a USB-C input that’s capable of 100W of power delivery.

I love the fact that you can ditch the hub and save some money. For a ton of users, a USB hub is extraneous in a monitor, and no other brand offers this level of flexibility. If you want to go with the USB hub, you even get a KVM switch, which I love to see.

The menu side of things isn’t as rosy. The on-screen display (OSD) has everything you need, but it’s difficult to navigate. Dough makes some attempts at clarity with short explainers for each of the options, but I suspect a lot of users will still get lost in the OSD. There are a ton of options, and with only a four-way joystick to get around, finding all of them can be a pain.

Image quality

Great design, a ton of features, and a price that — minus the stand — is very competitive with more mainstream options? So, what’s the catch with the Dough Spectrum Black? Image quality, it turns out. I’ve tested the exact same panel plenty of times before, and the results here don’t line up with what I’d expect. This is still an OLED monitor, and it still looks great, but Dough has a lot of work to do.

Gamut performance, which you can see below, sets the stage for why. In SDR, the gamut is spot on. I’ve seen some QD-OLED panels like the Alienware 32 QD-OLED crack above 90% of AdobeRGB, but for the most recent WOLED options, the gamut here is right. By default, the monitor sticks to DCI-P3, but it has options to clamp the gamut to different color spaces, as well.

And then HDR comes into the picture. These results are all off, but that’s because the tone mapping for SDR content is all off. You get that horrific grayed-out look that was familiar with HDR monitors a few years ago. HDR content looks good, but trying to run any SDR content on the display will throw the colors and contrast way off.

Dough has addressed SDR tone mapping a bit with a new firmware update. More on that later in this section.

Colors are a pain point in general, as you can see from my color accuracy results below. This panel should be hitting a color error of just over 1, but Dough’s display is hitting a color error of over 2 when measured against sRGB. You don’t need any fancy calibration tools to see that the color is off, either. Regardless of the preset I chose, it seemed like something was off. The Display-P3 settings pushes too heavily into the greens, for example, while the sRGB mode is too blue.

The firmware I tested isn’t the final firmware for the monitor, or so Dough tells me. And a firmware update here can fix the lack of proper tone mapping in HDR, as well as the color accuracy issues. Still, this is a fair analysis of the display right now. Dough has been selling this monitor for a while, and based on the Dough subreddit, there are plenty of users with the display in-hand.

Thankfully, the color issues don’t bleed into brightness. Some of LG Display’s latest WOLED panels, such as the one on the Asus ROG Swift PG32WCDM, can reach above 1,200 nits, but the brightness performance is still great here. Dough is able to clear 1,000 nits for highlights with ease, and SDR brightness, although not the best I’ve seen, isn’t bad.

Ultimately, this is still an OLED display. It looks great, particularly when you’re playing games or showing proper HDR content. It’s clear the sliders are off, though, and you don’t have a ton of options to bring the image quality back in-line without a proper firmware update. I’d be happy to recommend the Dough Spectrum Black if it’s able to get close to what this panel is capable of after a firmware update. As it stands now, however, the monitor needs more work.

A note on firmware updates

I originally tested the Dough Spectrum Black 32 with firmware 1.0.4, which is what the monitor shipped with. Most users will never perform a firmware update on their monitor, and I’d wager a good chunk don’t even know that monitors have firmware. Unless there’s some significant change with newer firmware, I like to test how the monitor performs the way it shows up — that’s the experience most users are going to get.

Given my results, I reached out to Dough, and it told me it had a firmware update almost ready that addressed some of the issues I noticed. What was supposed to be a delay of a few days ended up being close to two weeks. The firmware update continually failed, even after I resorted to scouring the Dough subreddit for a handful of tips that other users had come up with to get a firmware update to stick.

I eventually updated to firmware 1.0.7, which is the current firmware at the time of publishing. Without the gory details, trust me when I say that it was a pain to even flash the update on the monitor — something other Dough users are already talking about in the company’s subreddit. This update does, indeed, address some problems. But it introduces just as many.

For instance, the SDR tone mapping with HDR turned on is much better. It’s not perfect, but that’s a significant point of improvement. On the other hand, the firmware introduces an issue where the colors will significantly shift green with a full-screen application, and the only way to remove the green tint is to toggle HDR on and off.

It’d be one thing if there was some major issue with the monitor that Dough fixed with a single firmware update. It happens. But at this point, it’s generous to label any of these firmware updates as 1.0.x. It’s commendable that Dough wants to address community feedback with firmware updates, but at this point, these updates only serve to get the Spectrum Black 32 up to par with other OLEDs that cost the same price.

Gaming

A lot of what you need to know about gaming on the Dough Spectrum Black has been covered up to this point. You’re getting flicker-free VRR, BFI for console gaming, and the basically instant response times of an OLED panel. Add on a 480Hz refresh rate, emulation for multiple screen sizes, and pixel-perfect scaling for retro games, and you have a monitor that can handle just about any gaming scenario you can throw at it.

In light of the current image quality, it’s hard to say it’s a great gaming monitor, however. This is an OLED display, and games look good on it, but a variety of monitors from Asus, MSI, Alienware, and more have better color performance out of the box. It’s not too distracting on the Dough Spectrum Black, but it largely comes down to the games you play. In some titles and with some display settings, the colors don’t look quite right.

That doesn’t mean it’s unusable. I was able to have an enjoyable gaming experience with Special K, which I used to inject HDR into games with greater control over the output. These kinds of tools can counteract some of the issues baked into the current firmware, and if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, you’re left with a solid gaming experience. Still, you shouldn’t have to resort to third-party tools, especially when Dough is asking for just as much as the mainstream competition.

Warranty and burn-in

The Spectrum Black has a ton of burn-in mitigation features — too many, in fact. You get pixel shifting, pixel refresh, a screen saver, static element detection, and logo detection, but Dough goes much further. You’ll find settings like temporal peak luminance control, temporal target curve, and convex power control — and those are just a few of the options.

If you’re a display nerd, you might recognize some of these settings or their associated acronyms, but I’d wager that most people won’t. I don’t think Dough needs to get rid of these settings, but it’d be helpful to either better explain them with the tooltips in the OSD or to hide them in an advanced menu so casual users know which burn-in prevention settings are the most important.

That’s a suggestion, as Dough is clearly still working on some aspects of this monitor. The warranty is a criticism. Dough offers a two-year warranty that covers burn-in, matching LG, but falling behind most other monitor brands. The going timeframe for an OLED warranty is three years. I don’t think you’ll develop burn-in within three years in most cases, much less two years, but Dough is still behind the competition here.

Dough doesn’t have a great reputation for customer service, either. There’s a subreddit dedicated specifically to horror stories with the brand, particularly preorders that never shipped. The official Dough subreddit shows that customers are getting monitors, but there are still a ton of threads asking about where orders are.

You shouldn’t have issues ordering a monitor — they’re available and shipping from Amazon now, which is the route I’d suggest going with if you’re interested in picking one up — but the warranty doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Given Dough’s history, I hoped for a clearer commitment to customer service with its OLED release.

It needs more time

I want to like the Dough Spectrum Black. I love the design, and I appreciate Dough’s approach to customization options. The wealth of features even manages to help the Spectrum Black stand out from the dozens of other OLED monitors that have flooded the market. Still, it feels like a monitor that’s in beta testing.

I can appreciate the hard work that goes into optimizing a product after it’s available, as well as the communication Dough has with its community online after a tumultuous few years. But when the Spectrum Black costs just as much — and sometimes even more — than the competition, it’s hard to justify. There’s not enough meat on the bone here, and in some areas, such as image quality, you’re spending the same price for a worse display.