HP Omen Transcend 32 review: almost a perfect 10

I have to work backward for this review. The Omen Transcend 32 is one of the best gaming monitors you can buy, but I had some pretty negative first impressions of the display. An ungodly large power brick, a maximalist approach to features, and some weak SDR brightness turned me off to the monitor. But over my time using the Omen Transcend 32, it’s transformed into my favorite QD-OLED monitor.

That isn’t due to the image quality — sure, it can go toe-to-toe with another of the top OLED monitors. But really, it’s the attention to detail that HP paid not only to gamers but also creators, with this display, and the long list of features that go far beyond what the competition is offering.

HP Omen Transcend 32 specs

Design

There are several monitors packing this same QD-OLED panel, but you won’t mistake the Omen Transcend 32 for another display. It’s very unique, due in no small part to its white finish. Looking at the display brings back how I felt looking at the Alienware 34 QD-OLED for the first time — this monitor is different, at least visually.

The white particularly stands out with the square RGB bias light on the back of the monitor, which you can adjust through the menu. There are static and custom colors, but also breathing and color cycling effects. It’s large and very bright, which is more than I can say for the weaker bias lighting on most gaming monitors.

Although the white looks great, I don’t love how far it extends. The white backing comes all of the way up to the edge of the display, leaving a thin white strip around the borders of the screen. It’s not a dealbreaker, but it was a little distracting at first.

Elsewhere, things aren’t as rosy. For starters, the stand. It’s a slim design with decent room for adjustment, including 90 degrees of pivot and 25 degrees of tilt, but no swivel. I can live with that considering there’s a 100mm x 100mm VESA mount via a bracket HP includes. My bigger issue is cable management and one insane power brick.

For cable management, HP took the same approach as Samsung did with the Odyssey Neo G8. Instead of a channel running through the stand, you get a small hook to run your cables through at the back of the monitor. It’s not the best solution, and you’ll probably be left with some cable bulk. A proper routing channel helps clean up the mess, especially with HP’s back-facing inputs.

That’s a quibble, but the power brick is a criticism. HP includes a 480W power adapter in the box. It’s the largest power adapter I’ve ever seen — no, not the largest for a monitor, the largest period. It’s bigger than a Mac mini, just the brick, and with cables thick enough that you’d think you’re plugging in something like a server.

Features

At the very least, HP puts that massive power brick to good use. I’ve never seen a monitor that has more power flowing through it. The highlight is a USB-C input with 140W of power delivery — monitors like the MSI MPG321URX top out at 90W — but HP goes further. There are a ton of USB ports, and all of them have some power delivery. You get 7.5W on the USB-A ports and 15W on each of the USB-C ports, minus the USB-C port that supports up to 140W.

Although 90W is plenty for most circumstances, it makes sense that HP would go up to 140W on the Omen Transcend 32. Its Omen Transcend 14 gaming laptop uses a 140W USB-C charger, as do other thin and light laptops with a discrete GPU. With the Omen Transcend 32, you’ll actually be able to hook up something like that and keep the battery topped off solely from the display.

The more exciting inclusion is the KVM switch, or as HP calls it, Omen Gear Switch. The branding is actually pretty important because this isn’t just some standard KVM. You can independently control every USB port and transfer it between one of two inputs. You can also choose your two inputs, so you’re not locked to two specific types of inputs.

If that wasn’t enough, you can even transfer files between two PCs on separate inputs if you have the Omen Gaming Hub software installed. The power brick might feel like a literal brick, absolutely, but HP is doing a lot inside the Omen Transcend 32. Add on top of that separate menus for Gaming and Professional modes — more on that in the next section — and you have a display that feels like two monitors in one, even more so than dual refresh rate displays like Alienware AW2725QF.

With HP’s maximalist approach, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you get speakers in the Omen Transcend 32, but even those are cranked up. You get a quad-speaker array, each drawing up to 3W. They’re certainly better than most monitor speakers, whenever they actually show up, but the quality lags behind even an inexpensive Bluetooth speaker. That’s not a slight against HP — that’s just the nature of the beast with monitor speakers.

You also get picture-by-picture and picture-in-picture modes, and with several different layouts for each. You can actually see these different layouts in the menu, so you don’t have to cycle through the different options to see what you’re after.

Ports and menu

HP says it redesigned the on-screen display (OSD) for the Omen Transcend 32, and my lord, does it show. This is the best OSD I’ve ever used. No “probably,” no “one of.” This is the best one. It’s massive and high-resolution, and with options laid out in such a way that it feels like a desktop application. It’s so inviting that it feels like the OSD lacks certain settings, but when I poked around deep enough, I found just about everything.

You have custom picture modes with RGB primary adjustments, the ability to turn on or off the lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC), and above all, two different monitor modes. The Omen Transcend 32 has two separate menus — one for Professional mode and one for Gaming mode. The main difference between the two modes is the picture profile. The Professional mode has profiles that clamp the color to color spaces like DCI-P3 or sRGB, while the Gaming mode has a more traditional slate of picture modes for watching movies or playing certain genres of games.

There are a few other minor differences. The shortcuts for each mode are different, for example, with Gaming mode showing features like the on-screen crosshair and Professional mode offering up picture-by-picture. Those aren’t as important to me, though. What I love about this setup is that you can essentially have two presets running on the monitor at once — one for gaming and another for any professional work.

The Professional mode has some unique settings, too, including different HDR clipping levels and an automatic color space switch with macOS. I don’t think a lot of Mac users are in the market for a gaming monitor like this, but it’s great that the monitor can automatically swap to different color spaces as you’re working.

My only complaint is actually controlling the OSD. The OSD itself is fantastic, but HP puts the four-way joystick on the right side of the monitor, and you have to hunt for it a bit each time and slowly click through the options. A remote, or even a centered joystick, would go a long way in making the excellent OSD shine.

The port side of things is equally as exciting, not only due to the USB-C input with 140W of power delivery, but also DisplayPort 2.1. There are only a handful of monitors, like the Sony InZone M10S, that have DisplayPort 2.1. You don’t need it for this display, technically, though it’s nice to see considering you can turn off DSC.

Image quality

I’ve seen this panel before from MSI, Alienware, and Asus with the ROG Swift 32 QD-OLED. And just like those monitors, the Omen Transcend 32 is stunning, particularly on the color front. The factory calibration isn’t the best I’ve seen in sRGB, but it’s still very good, and a little calibration goes a long way to get it in a better spot.

Starting with color coverage, this third-gen QD-OLED panel from Samsung Display is unmatched. The gamut is massive, above 90% even in AdobeRGB, and the fact that you can clamp the display to various color spaces is huge. This is a great gaming monitor, but unlike its competitors, it’s also a great productivity monitor.

That’s due to the careful attention HP placed on the Professional mode, not only with different color spaces but also features like downstream RGB adjustment to match the display to a reference monitor, and quick controls to force HDR on or off in the OSD. You could use this monitor in production, and that’s more than I can say for most OLED gaming displays.

I would recommend calibrating it, though. Out of the box, the calibration is just a bit off measured against sRGB with a color error of a little over 1. That’s by no means a bad result — it’s totally usable for basic photo and video editing — but I’ve seen this panel put up better results out of the box before, particularly on the Alienware 32 QD-OLED.

Thankfully, even some basic, inexpensive calibration like you’ll find with a SpyderX is enough to take the color accuracy below a color error of 1. That’s fantastic, and it works perfectly with the creator focus that HP has taken with the Omen Transcend 32.

Brightness is a different story. Although QD-OLED has clearly come out ahead this generation in color coverage and accuracy, WOLED panels like you’ll find on the LG UltraGear Dual Mode OLED win the brightness war. That’s true for peak HDR brightness and also standard SDR brightness. It’s not a mark against the Omen Transcend 32 — it still gets plenty bright, and all QD-OLED options have lower brightness — but it’s something to keep in mind.

In SDR, you’re topping out right at 250 nits, which is the the same level I’ve seen other third-gen QD-OLED panels reach; and also the number that HP quotes. Higher SDR brightness would help the Omen Transcend 32 combat reflections, especially with its glossy coating, but that’s just not something we have with QD-OLED this generation.

That carries over into HDR, as well. You’re getting peak brightness just a touch below 1,000 nits, which is expected from this panel, which drops off to near 500 nits once you get to a 10% window. Sure, WOLED may be brighter this generation, but I’m just fine staring at 1,000-nit highlights.

Gaming

Games look incredible on the Omen Transcend 32, which really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Part of the look is the perfect black levels that OLED provides, sure, but it’s also the glossy coating on the display. In a dark room with the shades pulled, colors just fly off of the screen.

Like any gaming monitor worth its weight, the Omen Transcend 32 has a slew of certifications. You get variable refresh rate across the board, with badges for Nvidia G-Sync, AMD FreeSync, and VESA AdaptiveSync, as well as VESA’s ClearMR 13000, showing how much the 240Hz refresh rate and 0.03ms response time does for motion clarity.

The big question for gamers is if you want this QD-OLED display or one of the various dual refresh rate OLEDs we’ve seen like the ROG Swift PG32UCDP. That monitor, and others using the same panel, have better brightness and come with a speedy 480Hz refresh rate at 1080p should you want it. Still, I’m partial to QD-OLED.

Some of that is a bias toward more cinematic single-player games, absolutely, but it’s really hard to beat the colors of the Omen Transcend 32. It just looks jaw-dropping in games like Silent Hill 2, Metaphor: ReFantazio, and Cyberpunk 2077. And for all but the most competitive gamers, a 240Hz refresh rate with the low response times of OLED is more than enough.

Warranty and burn-in

I’ll be honest — I was worried about burn-in on the Omen Transcend 32 — not so much that this monitor would develop burn-in, but more that it wouldn’t include solid mitigation features or a comprehensive warranty like we’ve seen on displays like the Alienware 32 QD-OLED. But I’m happy to report that my concerns were unfounded.

Not only does HP include a three-year warranty that covers burn-in, matching most of the competition, it also includes several mitigation features. You get a panel refresh that runs automatically every 16 hours, letterbox and split-screen detection, lower-third detection, and static image detection. In each case, the monitor will automatically dim areas that are prone to burn-in, prolonging the life of the monitor.

You can turn each of these features off, as well as manually trigger the panel refresh. My only issue is the automatic panel refresh. You can’t adjust the interval in which the panel automatically refreshes, and you can’t turn off the feature. You probably don’t want to turn off panel refresh entirely, but some control over the intervals would help.

Almost perfect

I would normally start to chip away at the features and extras in a display like the Omen Transcend 32, asking if they’re really worth it to the average buyer. There’s so much going on in a monitor like this, and oftentimes, trimming the fat leads to a more reasonably priced display with a specific focus. What’s great is that I don’t need to do those mental gymnastics with the Omen Transcend 32.

It clocks in at $1,300, which is $100 more than the Alienware version and the same price as the Asus version. MSI’s take is $950 — and still my recommendation for most people interested in this panel — but HP is doing an awful lot to justify the $1,300 price tag here. Not only are you getting features like 140W of power delivery, an in-depth KVM switch, and integrations with macOS, you’re also getting the fantastic Professional and Gaming mode dynamic that I’ve gushed about in this review.

Make no mistake — this is a maximalist display. One of the other QD-OLED options is better if you’re, for example, primarily focused on gaming, assuming you find one of those options at a lower price. For those that even want to toy around with the extra features, though, the Omen Transcend 32 is a slam dunk.