This year, it felt like OLED took a couple of leaps in technology and pricing to close the book on the best monitor panel technology for most people. And yet mini-LED managed to get its foot in the door. The book? I might be mixing my metaphors here, but the big news is that despite the memory crisis continuing to gut pricing of almost everything else, 2026 has absolutely rocked for monitors.
And if you fancy an upgrade to a mini-LED 1440p gaming monitor, and the superb lighting that comes with it, you can pick up the KTC M27T6S at Best Buy for just $260. As far as I'm aware, that is the best price it has ever been.
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Our Jeremy took this monitor for a spin earlier this year, giving it 90% in his review, and it soon took a spot as the best 1440p gaming monitor in our summation.
The main appeal here is naturally that mini-LED panel, which uses lots of little LEDs to light up more specific parts of the screen compared to a standard LED panel. It's incredibly bright and kitted with a great dimming algorithm. In standard SDR usage, it's solid, but you need to use its HDR mode to really get the most out of it. Our Jeremy notes he was blown away when playing Cyberpunk 2077 on it.
He says, "The brighter desert scenes in Cyberpunk 2077 tend to find the weaknesses of OLED monitors; they simply can't handle how much of the panel needs to be driven hard to render the desert sun really well and so tend to look a bit dull. But this dirt cheap KTC monitor absolutely smashes it. The sun is so bright, it almost hurts your eyes. This is a genuine HDR experience and a level of realism that's completely different from your usual entry-level HDR 400 monitor."
It may surpass OLEDs in how it handles bright scenes, but it does show some weakness in much darker ones. You get a bit of light bleed and some glow behind dark scenes in use. The monitor does a good job of balancing out the weaker elements of mini-LED, but it doesn't remove them entirely.
On the specs front, you get a pretty solid 1 ms response time and a high 200 Hz refresh rate. These specs would be decent in a standard non-mini-LED 1440p gaming monitor, so it's a boon to the overall package. The monitor itself is also just fine from a build quality perspective. It's well put together but mostly plastic, and you aren't getting any sort of USB hub built into the device for charging your laptop while you play.
Still, this KTC panel is astoundingly cheap for mini-LED, and it genuinely puts up the fight to OLED, and for $10 less than the cheapest OLED I'd actually consider buying right now. Importantly, I've been tracking monitor prices all year round, and I've yet to see this specific monitor for just so cheap.
1. Best overall / 4K:
MSI MPG 322UR X24
2. Best budget 4K:
Asus ROG Strix XG27UCG
3. Best budget OLED
Alienware AW2726DM
4. Best 1440p:
MSI MPG 271QRX
5. Best budget 1440p:
KTC H27T22C-3
6. Best 1080p:
AOC Gaming C27G4ZXE
7. Best Ultrawide:
Gigabyte MO34WQC2
8. Best budget ultrawide:
Koorui 34E6UC
9. Best competitive
KTC 25M1
