HP Omen Transcend 32 OLED review

Too bad, impoverished senior HP. It’s already slow to the 32-inch OLED gaming monitor market with the recent Omen Transcend 32. You might be monotonous us a bit, but we feel like we’ve seen it all before, as you can see from our reviews of 4K OLED displays like the LG UltraGear 32GS95UE, Alienware 32 AW3225QF, Asus ROG Swift OLED PG32UCDM, Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED G80SD or MSI MPG 321URX.

Ultimately, there are only two sources you can go to for an actual 32-inch 4K OLED panel: LG and Samsung. So every monitor, including the recent HP, is a derivative of one of these two familiar technical themes. So what are the chances that HP has come up with something individual and convincing?

Actually, Omen Transcend 32 is quite good. The condition is that everything depends on the price. Conceptually, HP has opted for a full version of the 32-inch OLED riff. It’s a full 240Hz display, providing arguably the best connectivity of any display in its class, and HP has added some additional features to make it a great display for content creation as well.

All this would make you expect a rather painful price. And indeed, the suggested retail price is $1,299. That’s about $500 more than e.g MSI MAG 321UPwhich has essentially the same Samsung QD-OLED panel. The difference is that MSI doesn’t have true single-cable USB-C connectivity and it also runs at 165Hz.

However, you can actually buy this HP Omen for $999 at Best Buy, even at launch. In fact, the Omen website links to Best Buy if you click “Buy Now,” although the Omen Transcend 32 listing on HP’s sister site allows you to purchase it directly for $1,299. Much will depend on this disproportion, but we will return to the grubby issue of money later.

For a closer look at the details, the Omen monitor uses the latest Samsung QD-OLED 4K panel operating at 240 Hz and offering a response time of 0.03 ms. In other words, it’s damn brisk.

Its full-screen brightness is rated at 250 nits, just like any other Samsung-equipped 32-inch 4K OLED TV, and its maximum brightness is 1,000 nits for HDR content in a 3% window. Again, a lot compared to other Samsung-based 4K OLEDs, although these are great specs.

The Transcend 32 is starting to carve out something of a niche with its industrial design. The white back of the case is somewhat reminiscent of some Alienware and Samsung Odyssey panels. However, there are a few of Omen’s signature additions, such as the square base and slim stand. Overall, it looks quite elegant, although it may seem a little plasticky for such a premium panel.

As a reminder, the display adjusts to height, tilts, and rotates to portrait mode, but there is no rotation support whatsoever. There is also an undetectable magnetic headphone clip on the left side of the panel to support headsets.

However, where the Transcend 32 really starts to separate itself from the competition is with connectivity. In addition to two HDMI 2.1 and Display 2.1 ports and a USB hub with the ability to connect both USB-A and USB-C, the most noteworthy is the USB-C interface with DisplayPort Alt mode and 140W power delivery.

Yes, you read that right, 140W. That’s quite a bit more than the usual 90W and 100W that USB-C interfaces achieve in most monitors. HP says it’s enough to get the “full experience” with a single cable when gaming on your own Omen Transcend 14 gaming laptop.

We suspect this is because the Transcend 14 can be purchased with a relatively low-power Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU. Either way, we can confidently say that in our tests with an RTX 4080-equipped Lenovo laptop, 140W USB power supply -C was certainly not enough for the “full experience”. Using USB-C solely for power cuts Cyberpunk 2077’s frame rate in half, but even the resulting reduction in power consumption wasn’t enough to prevent battery drain during gameplay.

Either way, the bottom line is that the 140W USB-C interface will almost certainly not be enough to maintain the performance of most gaming laptops. But what it does allow for is a fairly powerful laptop that can be used alongside a gaming desktop. To this end, HP has included full support for KVM switches.

It’s also worth noting that, likely due to its advanced USB-C interface, this monitor comes with the most massive power supply we’ve ever seen for a monitor. It has a power of 480 W and weighs a ton.

Connectivity aside, what about the Transcend 32’s image quality? If there are basically no surprises, we can confirm that this is one of the better 32-inch 4K OLED displays from Samsung that we’ve seen. It’s well calibrated in SRGB mode, but more importantly, SDR content looks best and strongest with HDR enabled.

This means you can simply select HDR and you’re ready to watch all kinds of content. It’s also good to see that the panel brightness is very consistent across all modes, and there’s no evidence of any variation in desktop brightness depending on the content being displayed. In other words, the panel’s ABL, or automatic brightness limiter, is not intrusive at all.

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This may be due to the graphene foil heatsink and fan, with the latter operating almost inaudibly during our review. At least this is as powerful 4K QD-OLED as we’ve seen. It is also slightly less susceptible to the overly sultry color balance that some QD-OLED models have. Pretty.

Yes, you can still see the slightly gray, purplish tint to the panel itself in very brilliant ambient lighting. All QD-OLEDs suffer from this.

But for most users, this won’t be an issue, and the overall image quality, contrast, and HDR performance are simply fantastic.

Contrast and HDR graphics in particular benefit from a glossy coating that really allows the OLED lighting per pixel to be displayed while not being overly prone to glare. Everything is nicely judged.

The result is a truly outstanding gaming experience. Cyberpunk’s ray-traced HDR graphics look absolutely spectacular on the Transcend 32, and the 240Hz refresh rate and vanishingly brisk response times make for a very pleasant experience in shooters like Counter-Strike 2. Of course, such a 4K panel wouldn’t be your first choice if you want have the absolute last word with low latency and high frame rates. However, if you’re not a completely earnest esports type, the speed is more than adequate here.

Apart from all this gaming goodness, it’s a really handsome panel for more mundane desktop tasks. The pixel density of native 4K resolution is much clearer and sharper than, for example, a 27-inch 1440p panel or a 34-inch ultra-wide panel.

HP has also added several features specifically for content creation professionals, including customizable HDR crop levels, manual control or HDR control via AV info frame, and factory calibration. We’re also huge fans of Omen’s OSD controls. The interface is extremely logical, clear and basic to apply, and includes all the features and options that most users would like to see.

Oh, and HP built a quartet of down-firing speakers that deliver above-par comfort. They will not replace even basic, dedicated speakers. But in a pinch they provide decent sound and are useful as a transient backup.

The overall result, then, is that this is certainly one of the more attractive and better-resolving 32-inch 4K OLED displays we’ve seen. Is this the best? It’s challenging to say. But one thing is certain. Its attractiveness largely depends on the price.

With HP’s MSRP of $1,299, we weren’t too concerned about this. There are alternatives you can buy for $300 less that will provide a similar experience. But at the $999 price tag that Best Buy currently has, the Transcend 32 is a different proposition.

In fact, if you need a USB-C connection and share such a monitor between a gaming desktop and a laptop, then the Omen will probably be our pick of the current lineup.

Of course, we could argue that if you only care about desktop gaming and don’t mind giving up 240Hz for 165Hz, the cheapest of MSI’s options will be the obvious choice. And if the $200 price difference is significant to you, then it absolutely makes sense.

But if you can afford the full $1,000, as a whole package in terms of its affluent feature set and marginally better image quality compared to cheaper alternatives, this HP Omen is probably worth the extra cash. It’s definitely worth being on your shortlist for 4K gaming OLED TVs.