Microsoft announces new Designed for Xbox monitors from partners

The Xbox Series X/S consoles are capable of quite a bit — so much so, in fact, that the TV or monitor you’re currently using may not be taking full advantage of the hardware. With so many options out there, though, it may be hard to determine which displays are going to work best with your machine. That seems to be where Microsoft’s new Designed for Xbox monitors come in. These monitors — built by third-party companies — are cleared by Team Xbox to work with all the next-gen features, including 120 FPS refresh rates, HDMI 2.1, and more.

At the moment, Microsoft has three Xbox monitors tagged with the “Made for Xbox” label. All are capable of displaying content at 4K and 120 FPS, all support HDMI 2.1 connections, all are built to take advantage of AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, and all are capable of HDR.

What seems to set them all apart are their sizes and their prices. The 55-inch Philips Momentum 559M1RYV will ring up at $1,599 when it launches in the summer. The ASUS Strix Xbox Edition Gaming Monitor XG43UQ — a 43-inch model due to arrive in October — currently has no price attached to it, though we imagine it’ll be slightly less than that of the Philips product. Finally, the Acer Xbox Edition Gaming Monitor XV282K, coming in at 28 inches, will cost you $949 this fall.

Yes, these displays are fairly expensive. I suppose the arm and the leg you’ll pay for them all, though, do at least afford you some peace of mind in return. If you buy one of these Made for Xbox monitors, you can rest assured you’ll be squeezing every bit of capability from your Xbox Series X or Series S. You’ll get a 4K picture, the highest possible frame rates, support for VRR (variable refresh rate), and more. You’ll have to decide if the price tags are worth all that.

If these are a bit too much for you, however, you can simply kick back and wait another year or two. By then, a lot of these features will be more common in both monitors and TVs, and the prices will likely have dropped quite a bit more on them, too. You can get a decent 4K TV now for a few hundred bucks, and that wasn’t the case years ago. As time passes, good tech makes way for even better (and more expensive) tech, and prices plummet. That’s just the way it goes.

All of these displays are due out in the months ahead. We’ll be sure to let you know how they fare once reviews start rolling in.