If you’re a content creator, there currently aren’t many OLED monitors marketed towards you. Some may supply a color calibration report on the box or mention their average Delta E values, but most OLED monitors are strictly marketed as gaming-first. Adding to this long list is the OMEN Transcend 32, HP’s latest and greatest gaming monitor.

It also brings everything but the kitchen sink to your workstation, with built-in speakers, rear illumination, and even a headphone mount. HP calls this monitor “the portal between playing and creating” and appears to make more effort than other OLED monitors to promote its readiness for creators. What specific requirements and features should a content creator actually look for in a monitor? In this review, we’ll pinpoint what the HP OMEN Transcend 32 offers for both gamers and artists.

About this review: HP loaned the monitor tested for this review. The company had no involvement in the content of this review. Testing was conducted on firmware version 1.0.6.0.

Price and availability

The HP OMEN Transcend 32 is currently available at Best Buy and HP at a launch price of $1300. At this price point, it’s one of the more expensive 4K 32-inch OLED monitors, matching the cost of the ASUS PG32UCDM/PG32UCDP. If you just wanted the cheapest 4K 32-inch 240Hz QD-OLED monitor, you can purchase the MSI MPG 321URX for $350 less.

Design and tech

The monitor’s exterior has a two-toned monochrome look: a bright-white finish for the rear housing, clashing against dark gray for the chin, stand, and base. Despite being entirely of plastic construction, the chassis looks and feels premium. Also included is a magnetic hook that attaches to the top-left of the monitor, which can hold a pair of headphones. Neat.

What I dislike is the white border around the screen, which is made worse by the thick bottom branding. The chin is needlessly tall, and the white perimeter jarringly halts at the bottom corners. The HyperX logo further cheapens the appearance and seems redundant since HP has acquired the company; a peelable sticker would work better.

the built-in speakers are quite a bit better than others I’ve heard

Where HyperX shines is through audio. The OMEN Transcend 32 OLED contains four 3-watt bottom-firing speakers, tuned by the HP subsidiary. They fire in true stereo, producing decent imaging and detail for casual gaming and video. If you can’t afford the price or space of budget speakers on your desk, then these will do in a pinch. They’re quite a bit better than most other built-ins I’ve heard, but they still sound flat at the end of the day — I don’t think they’re substantial enough to warrant a second logo permanently printed on the front of the monitor.

Coming out the other end, the OMEN OLED utilizes active fans for cooling. The bottom gratings for the speakers appear to double up as air intake, exhausting out the top. From my usage, the fan could be faintly heard if the room was dead quiet or if I pressed my ear close to the top venting. Compared to a fanless design, active cooling can be more effective in displacing heat and extending the longevity of the OLED, but it also introduces another component that may fail. Luckily, the OMEN OLED also comes with a 3-year warranty which should cover fan failure and screen burn-in.

Powering the monitor is one of the largest power bricks I've ever seen. It's utterly unwieldy on my desk, and I'm unable to hide it in my current cable-managed setup due to its weight and size. It has a max load of 450 watts, giving the USB ports tons of room to breathe.

The panel itself uses Samsung Display’s Gen 3 QD-OLED, which has been around for almost a year. This should give it similar output characteristics to other QD-OLED monitors on the market, with differences mainly found in tuning and feature sets. The screen finish here is glossy, which delivers an inkier appearance at the cost of direct reflections. However, since current QD-OLEDs lack a polarizer layer, they redirect more ambient light than a typical glossy display. Because of this, QD-OLEDs can have lower real-world contrast in all but the dimmest lighting when compared to W-OLED. The difference may be indiscernible in many scenarios, but in some content and setups, the raised black levels can stand out.

At 32 inches, the 4K screen looks plenty sharp. One caveat is that QD-OLEDs use a non-conventional subpixel layout, producing more color fringing than the traditional striped RGB layout. It’s mostly only present with light text on dark backgrounds, which is made worse if you have astigmatism.

One of the neatest features of the OMEN 32 OLED is its rear lighting system. It’s the brightest I’ve seen on any monitor and easily customizable in the OSD. You can fine-tune its RGB color and brightness, which I’ve set up to produce a D65 bias light on my rear wall — a valuable component for creators and night dwellers. It’s also compatible with Windows 11’s Dynamic Lighting API, which can be used to adjust multiple RGB devices that also work with it simultaneously. When the monitor goes on standby, the lighting turns off and will automatically light back up once resumed.

Ports and connectivity

The OMEN 32 OLED provides two HDMI 2.1 ports and a single DisplayPort 2.1 for video input. There is also one USB-C port that can carry a video signal (up to 10Gbps) via DP Alt Mode and deliver up to 140 watts to power a device such as a laptop. The ports on the back are forward-facing rather than backward-facing, which makes them much neater and easier to access.

the v2.1 DisplayPort on this monitor is only specced for UHBR10, which still compresses 4K 240 Hz

One of the main benefits of DisplayPort 2.1 is its higher throughput, potentially allowing a 4K 240Hz signal to be sent without display stream compression (DSC). Sadly, the v2.1 DisplayPort on this monitor is only specced for UHBR10, only allowing a max bandwidth of 40Gbps. This enables driving 4K 120 Hz without DSC (which DisplayPort 1.4 wasn’t capable of) but not 4K 240Hz, which requires a throughput of about 70Gbps. To achieve that, you would need the higher tier UHBR20, which has a maximum throughput of 80Gbps.

If you want to use your monitor with multiple machines, the OMEN 32 OLED supports an advanced KVM switch. It comes well-equipped with three USB-A ports and two USB-C ports for data and peripherals. When paired with the OMEN Gaming software, it grants simultaneous use of peripherals between connected machines, enabling clever tricks like Picture-by-Picture or Picture-in-Picture while allowing the mouse to traverse between views seamlessly. If you don’t wish to use additional software, there’s a physical KVM button behind the monitor that lets you instantly switch between the connected machines.

Menu and features

To access the monitor settings, a joystick on the rear-right of the chassis toggles and navigates the on-screen display (OSD) menu. The design and layout of the menu is remarkably clean and, in my opinion, the best-looking OSD on any gaming monitor. For my taste, though, the menu text is a touch too large, requiring multiple clicks to read the span of one section.

Picture tuning

Any display intended for creators should provide the appropriate tools to tune the colors on the screen. Even with sophisticated factory calibration, it’s often imperfect, with occasional recalibration still being required. Being able to monitor your content using different color space characteristics is also a crucial capability. The OMEN 32 OLED lets you do all of this with some caveats.

The OMEN OLED lets you choose between Display P3, BT.709, sRGB, and Adobe RGB for color presets. Display P3 is the default mode, which expands colors slightly if not used in a color-managed setup. The sRGB preset will be the most accurate setting for most PC content, but it should be noted that it uses the flatter sRGB IEC tone curve rather than gamma 2.2. The BT.709 preset is similar but targets gamma 2.4 and sets the display white level to about 100 nits.

In order to target a custom white point, color gamut, or tone curve, you must use the HP Display Center software and create a new calibration preset. However, this requires that you have both the monitor, and a supported colorimeter connected through USB. The setup requires you to take measurements for actual calibration. However, this shouldn’t be necessary if you just want to mix and match color parameters; for example, Rec.709 primaries with D50 white point and standard gamma 2.2.

For manual color tuning, the OMEN 32 OLED doesn’t offer much. It allows changing the RGB gain and black offset, though only the gain setting is useful for most calibrations to balance the white point. I would have loved to see multipoint grayscale adjustments, commonly found on TVs, allowing for fine control over the tone response. It’d also be nice to manually tune the gamut RGB, rather than rely on automatic calibration to derive its target.

Creator tools

When monitoring a film or photo for public broadcast, it’s important that graphics and text aren’t positioned too close to the edges. Sometimes, the content's aspect ratio may differ from the screen’s, viewed on a player zooming in fullscreen. For example, a widescreen CinemaScope 21:9 film expanded to fill up a typical 16:9 monitor will require cutting off a good chunk of the sides. Or, a really old TV can be imperfectly aligned, cutting off the sides.

The OMEN 32 OLED can mark out the EBU broadcast guidelines for where you should place captions and any important graphics so that they remain visible to the vast majority of viewers. Other compositional tools like the rule of thirds and a center crosshair are also available.

Rear lighting

Most lighting systems I’ve seen on monitors have been gimmicks, often being far too dim to have any practical effect. On the HP OMEN 32, the lighting gets bright enough actually to illuminate my dark-gray walls behind it. For gamers, this could just be some extra RGB aesthetic to add to your setup. However, for content creators, this could work as makeshift bias lighting. If you work or play in the dark, the ambient lighting also helps to alleviate eye strain by maintaining a more consistent eye-pupil state.

the rear lighting system is the brightest I’ve seen on any monitor and easily customizable

Through the OSD, it’s possible to adjust the RGB output of the lighting system. If you have a light meter, you could calibrate the light output to your desired color, or you could just eyeball it against a pattern shown on the display. Measuring the center of the wall toward the light, I could measure up to about 200 lux. But against my dark walls and rear distance, I could only measure out to 2 nits D65 at the surrounds; setups with lighter walls closer to the monitor may reach the 5 nits commonly recommended for modern mastering standards.

HyperX audio

The HP OMEN 32 OLED comes with four 3-watt speakers built in, all bottom-firing in stereo. They get decently loud, and the volume can quickly be adjusted through the joystick on the back. If speaker audio is not a top priority for you, these work well in keeping your desk footprint to a minimum while providing decent audio, at least as far as built-in monitor speakers go. The default tuning is okay but ultimately is limited by physics — they still sound like they’re coming from the bottom, and their lack of any substantial low-end owes to a more boxy tune.

The default tuning comes from HyperX, but there is also a DTS Music and Video preset. You can even use your own custom EQ preset, though this requires installing the OMEN Gaming Hub and using their 10-band solution. Out of the presets, DTS Music sounds the best to my ear for many sources, but it causes the compressor to kick in extra aggressively whenever any sub-bass comes in, even at lower volumes. Because of this, I’d stick with the default HyperX preset or experiment with a custom EQ that makes generous cuts to certain frequencies rather than gains.

OLED protection

Each subpixel in an OLED is made up of organic material, which all eventually decay and burn out — or rather, burn in. Monitors are products that are usually expected to last at least a couple of years, and it’s in our best interest not to support electronics that end up being in landfills after one year. Fortunately, competition is healthy in the OLED space, and monitor makers place a significant priority on making sure their OLEDs last as long as possible, even to the extent of limiting performance.

The HP OMEN OLED has three optional burn-in prevention features: static screen detection, lower third detection, and letterbox detection. The name tells you exactly what they do, with static screen detection and letterbox detection enabled by default.

• Static screen detection will dim down the entire screen if it’s been completely still for thirty seconds. It will immediately brighten once anything moves, such as your mouse. It’s a surprisingly simple feature that Windows does not have, and I leave it enabled.
• Lower third detection checks for static content on the lower third of the screen, such as icons or logos, dimming and desaturating them.
• Letterbox detection checks for dark bars, either vertically or horizontally, and dims the pixels near the edges to diffuse pixel wear-in. From my experience, this caused noticeable vignetting in some applications, so I left it disabled.

Like every other OLED, this monitor also requires an occasional pixel refresh, which is essential to delay burn-in. It takes about seven minutes to complete and will prompt you to run it every eight hours of accumulated screen-on time. If you defer the pixel refresh, the monitor will automatically run the next time it goes on standby. The pixel refresh will forcibly execute if the screen remains on for more than four hours after the deferment. The LED on the bottom-right of the monitor will pulse as the pixel refresh occurs, stopping once it’s complete.

There’s also pixel shifting onboard, which cannot be disabled. The entire screen will occasionally shift around a pixel or two in a random pattern to diffuse the accumulation of pixel charge. There are additional pixels around the screen beyond the 3840x2160 signal resolution to ensure that the pixel-shifting feature does not crop any pixels at the edges. The screen may appear misaligned for this reason, but it’s no reason to worry.

Brightness

To this day, every QD-OLED monitor on the market has had near-identical screen brightness, and the OMEN 32 OLED is no different. It’s specced for 250 nits for a full screen of white, reaching up to 1000 nits for small highlights in HDR. From these numbers alone, it might seem that it gets plenty bright in HDR, but achieving that peak has a large penalty to overall brightness when more pixels need to be lit up.

the max SDR brightness ... should be completely adequate for any indoor setting

Since each pixel in an OLED is self-emissive, it uses up vastly more power to brighten up the entire screen compared to just a small area. To reach the full 1000 nits in HDR, the kicker is that the screen must be using less than 3% of its maximum display power. This means your viewing content must be primarily dark pixels, with only very few bright regions. When the display uses up more than 3% of its power budget, it will dim the screen, becoming darker the more power it consumes. A common misconception is that only the peak brightness gets limited; instead, the entire screen dimming down together.

The resulting dimming often produces bright scenes that are overly dark. OLED monitor makers are aware of this, which is why they use a different HDR power profile by default. Instead, the peak brightness only reaches 450 nits in this mode, but with more lenient power restraints that don’t result in extreme dimming levels. Dark scenes with bright highlights won’t pop as much, but some outdoor scenes do end up looking more vibrant since there's less dimming. Also, if you prefer to keep the Windows OS in HDR mode, there will be significantly less window dimming in this mode when you change the size of applications.

In SDR, things are more straightforward, with brightness remaining the same regardless of content or power usage. By default, the screen is set to a display white level of 170 nits. The maximum brightness is around 246 nits, with a minimum of 14 nits at its lowest setting. The max SDR brightness may seem low when compared to a decent IPS monitor, but I insist that 250 nits should be completely adequate for any indoor setting.

Color performance

One of the pillars of a creator-ready display is a strong and predictable base calibration. It should also include ways to fine-tune color, ideally through integrated hardware. The HP OMEN Transcend 32 somewhat fulfills these requirements but falls short in its tuning potential to provide the color reproduction expected from a reference display. This is a high bar to clear indeed, but it ultimately distinguishes an excellent color-grading display from consumer monitors.

As expected from a QD-OLED, the maximum color gamut available for the HP OMEN 32 is remarkably large, extending past the DCI-P3 and digging into BT.2020 territory. While the HP OMEN 32 doesn't reach the vibrant colors of QD-OLED TVs, most content doesn't utilize such colors, so the difference is hardly noticeable.

The base color calibration of the HP OMEN OLED is exceptional

Despite such an expansive gamut, the colors in most content are still well within Rec.709/sRGB, and it continues to be the default gamut of the internet. For this display to render things accurately, it must be set to the sRGB or BT.709 calibrated color presets. The latter follows the most common standard in the video industry, using a steep 2.4 gamma curve for viewing in a dim environment. The sRGB preset should be used in casually brighter environments, deploying a tone curve that produces lighter shadows to combat glare.

The base color calibration of the HP OMEN OLED is exceptional in SDR. However, like the Dell 32-inch QD-OLED I reviewed, the calibration of the display will vary as the panel heats up. The brighter the content on your screen, the more it heats the display. Regardless of which color preset is being used, the lightness of shadows gets raised the more the display is used, up to a certain limit. This is not an uncommon characteristic among displays: most TVs require a warm-up time of about thirty minutes before calibration, which is similar to the time this monitor needed to stabilize its tone curve. Instead, this panel is most accurate when it boots up after being off for a while.

The same behavior also exists in HDR. Again, we're seeing spectacular color accuracy for the entire gamut of the panel in HDR, but only on a cold boot. After about 30 minutes, the EOTF noticeably lifts, and the image becomes slightly flatter. If we're nitpicking — as professional colorists do — there is a small bit of black crush present near black in both HDR modes, and saturated blues aren't as precise as they compared to SDR.

To be clear, it's not the lifting that's the issue — this occurs with every other OLED I've tested to a varying degree. Simply, the monitor should have been calibrated with this lift in mind, as most computer sessions probably last more than 30 minutes. In order to compensate for this, you'll need an external light-measuring instrument, like a colorimeter, to calibrate it.

HP has its own color calibration flow in its HP Display Center, but from my experience, it's painfully slow and frequently fails to detect my monitor or colorimeter. If you make it through the calibration process, it does a decent job of fixing the over-brightened bits. Still, the inability to apply an instrument correction makes it a non-starter for serious calibration work. My resulting auto-calibration produced gray tones with correct contrast but tinted toward magenta, reducing the overall color accuracy. Thus, you'll need to use a third-party color calibration solution for the most accurate colors.

Should you buy the HP OMEN Transcend 32 OLED?

You should buy the HP OMEN Transcend 32 OLED if:

• You're both a gamer and a content creator who can make use of the resolution, dynamic range, and color gamut
• Your desk benefits from the built-in speakers, rear illumination, or headphone mount
• You want a sophisticated KVM with high-power USB ports

You should not buy the HP OMEN Transcend 32 OLED if:

• You'll be using it in a bright room
• You're expecting a true reference-level display without needing to calibrate it yourself using external tools
• You hate white screen bezels

The HP OMEN Transcend 32 OLED is an absolute workhorse of a monitor, providing almost everything you would need in a monitor for both high-quality work and competitive play. On the creator side, I wish there were more accessible ways to dial in the calibration outside of using HP's software. However, experienced users who require the highest degree of accuracy likely already have their own calibration equipment and workflow. Still, it would be nice if the base calibration factored in the lifted shadows. At $1300, it's on the pricier side for a 32-inch 4K QD-OLED, but it has more features than any other OLED gaming monitor I've tested. It will be up to your particular use case if the price is worth it, but I believe its performance and unique capabilities make it recommendable.