Dough claims to have 240Hz BFI – with up to 120fps content – working on its upcoming 27-inch OLED monitor, which is also the first with AR coating.

In December 2022, Dough announced the Spectrum ES07E2D. It is based on the same 27-inch WOLED panel from LG Display as other 27-inch OLED gaming monitors on the market. However, Dough's OLED monitor is the first with AR coating (glossy).



First OLED monitor with BFI
Dough is now also claiming another 'first' for OLED monitors; 240Hz BFI (Black Frame Insertion) to further reduce pixel persistence and motion blur. This is possible because intermediate black frames continuously "reset" the human eye to make motion appear sharper on a (sample-and-hold) display. 

- "So today, we’re excited to announce that we have successfully implemented BFI in our OLED Spectrum at up to 120FPS and will continue working on it to achieve the best performance our monitor can offer," the company announced.

It works by inserting a black frame between each image refresh, which is why Dough refers to it as 240Hz BFI. In this scenario, BFI will work with up to 120fps gaming, as every second refresh is reserved for the black frame.

If you do not want to use BFI, since it tends to flicker and reduce display brightness, you can just run the OLED monitor at 240Hz for full 240fps support instead. Dough provides more details on its BFI implementation in the table below.

Dough was formerly named Eve and does not have the best track record

The 27-inch Dough Spectrum ES07E2D is currently available for presale for $749 and will retail for $1099 in July 2023.

240Hz BFI on Dough Spectrum ES07E2D
In Dough's own words:

"Even though our panel cannot turn off the panel in between refresh cycles, we can still tell the pixels to turn off as part of a refresh cycle. By alternately sending the panel a new image frame, and then a fully black frame, the result is similar. This method of inserting black frames is appropriately called ‘black frame insertion’ (BFI). Blur Busters has an excellent Test UFO demo that simulates the effects of BFI on eye-tracking blur here.

The good news is that by working with our scaler manufacturer, we were able to successfully implement this alternate form of image strobing. The bad news is that this method is more limited.

For one, we are using actual refresh cycles to insert the black frames. The more black frames we insert, the fewer image frames we can show. So even though we have this working at up to 240Hz, we can only display up to 120 unique frames – the other 120 frames are necessarily black (Figure 7). This means that while BFI is active, Spectrum effectively behaves like a 120Hz monitor. Albeit a 120Hz monitor with very little motion blur!

Another limitation of this method is that we don’t have nearly as much control over that balance between brightness and blur reduction. With every other frame, image persistence is 50%, and that’s it. Our firmware team is working on settings that allow a new frame every third (Figure 8), or every fourth refresh cycle (Figure 9), with the frames in-between being black. This would offer settings for 33% and 25% persistence respectively, and would further reduce motion blur. Of course, this would now not only reduce the brightness, but also the maximum frame rate (in these cases, down to 80 and 60fps)."

 Illustration: Dough

"If that’s not your cup of tea, there is of course always the option to leave it off. Without BFI, you unluck the full potential of the panel with a 240Hz refresh rate and maximum brightness. That said, we are proud and excited to offer this implementation of strobing on our OLED monitor. Despite the limitations the results speak for themselves, and any game that doesn’t run at more than 120fps will look amazingly blur-free on Spectrum."
 FlatpanelsHD