New monitor, colors washed out

Question

I'm trying to sort an issue in relation to a new monitor. I recently came home to one of my MSI Optix MAG241C montiors dead, and have been in the market for a replacement or better yet a replacement set.

However I'm having a very hard time finding something with similar color hue/saturation/vividness to my remaining MAG241C, I recently tried an SAMSUNG Odyssey G3 (LS24AG302NNXZA), and an MSI G242C. Problem is both monitors look washed out, or like there's a filter over their colors in a way that I just cannot adapt to.

Forgive my terrible pictures, I had to take them of the monitors with my phone:

Main monitor MAG241C picture - https://imgur.com/a/ocymQnR

Samsung Odyssey G3 picture - https://imgur.com/a/k1wLR66

Discord Side By Side Across Both - https://imgur.com/a/5SH23IL

There's no point in posting the MSI G242C since it was much the same flavor of color fadedness as the odyssey.

I went through every setting I could find on both new monitors, color modes, color temp, even RGB balancing (which I know nothing about) but nothing really brought the colors where one would expect, and none of the monitors have a saturation/hue option. Turning down the green in RGB just makes the screen red tinted.

All monitors are running on DisplayPort on a 2080 Super and using my existing ports and cables that were working fine as of the death of the first monitor.

I tried going into Nvidia control panel and flicking the Dynamic Range, but it didn't change anything and both screens are set to "Use default color settings" usually.

Frankly I'm at a total loss. It's been a week and two monitors from amazon and I just don't know what else to do. I don't know enough about monitors to know why the color difference is so drastic in the first place. Or to find out how to find one that isn't washed out like that, so I can't even buy a proper new set and call it a day.

If anyone has any insight, or can help me understand why the colors are this way, and thus can recommend a monitor more in the vein of what I have, I would be genuinely appreciative, as I'm at the end of my rope.

Answer 1

A picture of a game is a really poor colour test, but to me the first one looks massively over-saturated - and unless Discord is supposed to have a purple background, the new monitor is doing a far better job of rendering at least flat greys.
We have also your phone's auto white balance to contend with, which might be different for each picture.

If you have two identical diaplays from the same manufacturing batch, then you might be in with a shot that they both arrive calibrated the same.
If you've got different manufacturers, you going to need proper manual calibration. You do this from your OS, not from the display.
Your best bet is a hardware colorimeter - which will come with software to get the best match for each display independently.

The two major players in this field are Calibrite [used to be called X-Rite] & Datacolor.

You can try to achieve this by eye, but as you've already discovered, it's not easy & good results are hard to obtain. Your alternative is a pair of matched displays.