Widescreen Gaming Forum

A few weeks ago my 6yo daughter received her first pair of "real" boots. They were black rumpled leather, with some chrome studs and buckles decorating the outside. When she held them in her hands, she spoke with an awed voice, "I have been waiting for this day my whole life".

This is how I feel about the 34UC97 monitor, which I recently received from LG. **THIS** is the monitor I've been waiting for.

The LG 34UC97 is a 34" ultra-wide 21:9 aspect ratio monitor. The display features a curved IPS panel with 3440x1440 resolution, which supports more than 99% of sRGB.



This is our first panel review. I'd like to point out that we don't have the tools (or depth of technical knowledge) for a deep technical review that someone like TFT Central would do. Very few sites have that, and it's why I keep FTFC in my bookmarks. If they get a review unit of the 34UC97, we'll link to it here. They did review the 34UM95, and rather liked it.

This review will be "experiential". What was our experience using the monitor. How well did it perform versus our expectations, and against other display configurations. We'll be looking at both productivity and gaming scenarios.

First Impressions

First, let's get first things out of the way. How does the panel look? How does it perform? Short answer - it's amazing. Long answer - it's amazing. Actually, the long answer is to keep reading below for more detailed analysis and critique, but it's by far my new favorite panel.

The LG 34UC97 boasts a curved IPS panel, which carries a brightness of 300 nits (cd/m2) and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. Specs are great, and these are about what you'd expect in a high end IPS panel. But specs can be (and often are, in the case of contrast) misleading. The real question is, how does it actually look.

It looks gorgeous. Colors are vivid, and pop thanks to the IPS panel. Viewing angles are great, owing both to the IPS panel and the curved display. Contrast is excellent, with bright whites and black blacks. But, all of this could be for naught if you're stuck with a high-glare panel.

Gladly the panel excels in this area as well. LG used a semi-matte finish, which greatly reduces glare, while also providing the rich colors mentioned before. The curved panel also helps with reducing glare.

Anyone whose done much photography learns that you never take a flash picture directly in front of a glass case or enclosure - say at the zoo or a museum. Doing so results in a blinding glare and flash that bounces straight back into the camera lens. To get proper results, you must stand at an angle, so that the light from the flash bounces away from the camera.

The curved panel operates in much the same manner. In my home office, my L-shaped desk backs up to a large set of windows. When seated to work on the productivity side, for my day job, the window is to my right. Late in the afternoon, as the sun was going down, I had to deal with strong glare on the Samsung 4k panel.

With the curved LG panel, the sun that gets through the blinds also finds an obstacle in the right-hand leading edge of the panel, which ends up shading much of the rest of the panel. The left-hand edge of the panel ends up at an obtuse angle to the window, so the sunlight bounces away from my line of sight. What light is reflected off the panel is muted, thanks to the semi-matte finish.

With the panel set up on the gaming side of the desk, it now faces the window. The corners don't provide any shade, but their curve of the display angles the light away from my eyes. Again, the semi-matte finish mutes both the light hitting it face on from the window, as well as any overhead light from the ceiling.

Package Contents

The box comes with about what you'd expect for a monitor: the panel itself, parts for monitor base, power cables, assorted display cables and driver CD. A few points to note:

• The display doesn't have an integrated power supply, so the power cable is actually a full power supply and cable.
• Be sure you retain the styrofoam packaging. There is a curved piece that is crucial to keep on hand. It's used when laying the curved panel down on a flat surface, for attaching the monitor base or VESA mount.
• The panel itself doesn't have a VESA mounting pattern. The VESA adapter isn't included for North America customers. You can contact LG to get one.

Assembly & Setup

Assembly of the stand is simple. Place the stand upright into the V-shaped base, and secure with two screws. From there, place the panel face down on a table - making sure to use the curved styrofoam for support, and attach the assembled stand with two more screws. Snap on the cover to hide those two screw holes.

The included base only offers tilt - no height adjustment or rotation. Rotation really isn't a viable option on the included stand, due to the size of the monitor. There is also no "included" left-right turning, but the stand itself is easy enough to adjust on the desk. Again, once set, the size and weight of the monitor makes L-R turning an undertaking.



Mounting the VESA adapter is quite the same. Place the monitor face down - again using the styrofoam for support - and then screw the VESA bracket into the monitor. Once

The VESA adapter attaches to the panel on the same bracket as the stand - the point of the tilt adjustment. I'm used to fixed VESA adapters, which are screwed directly into the panel back. But, I found that when mounted on the WSGF Ultimate Stand, the monitor naturally settled into a natural "upright" position. The monitor fell perpendicular to my desk without any adjustments.

There are many options for connecting the monitor to your Mac, PC or media device. The 34UC97 offers 2x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort, 2x ThunderBolt 2, and USB 3 (1 up, 2 down). One cool thing to note on the HDMI connections - even an older HDMI connection (such as a 2011 Mac Mini) can drive the 3440x1440 resolution at 50Hz. The 34UC97 also has 7 watt stereo speakers, and a joystick for menu navigation.



The display comes with two CD-ROMs. The first is the display driver and user guide. The second is the Split Screen software, which is available for both Mac and PC.

Productivity

I spent the first week of my review using the LG 34UC97 as my "daily driver" for my day job. Prior to using the 34" 21:9 panel, I had been using a 28" 4k Samsung display. Having the large 28" display was great, but with the 4k resolution and pixel density, I found myself zooming everything but email past 100%.

To work on any Microsoft Office document - be it Visio, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, etc. - I'm running the "zoom" at 125% to 150%. This effectively defeats the 4k resolution, and puts the "effective" usable resolution at somewhere closer to 2560x1440.

Using the 34UC97 with its ultra-wide aspect and 3440x1440 resolution was a marked improvement over the quasi-4k resolution I was actually using on my 28" 4k panel. The more usable pixel density meant that I could work with everything at 100%, without needing to zoom past that mark. The extra horizontal resolution meant I could work with multiple programs up simultaneously.

Samsung offers their Split Screen utility to help manage and arrange multiple windows on your desktop. The LG 34UC97 carries almost 5 million pixels. It's a lot of real estate to manage. The Split Screen application provides a number of pre-configured options for window arrangement - and allows you to adjust each one of them on the fly. You're left with an almost limitless number of possibilities.

The only real drawback is that any window is maximized in its "area", so there isn't any option to have a section for "free form" windows such as a Steam friends list and chat window.

Check out the video below to see the tool in action. I look at two use cases. The first is entering a Detailed Report into the WSGF games database. The second is using Photoshop Elements, while listening to Spotify and chatting on Steam.



Below are a set of screens I took from my Retina Macbook Pro. The first is Final Cut Pro X being run on the native screen - which has the scaling adjusted for "more space" resolution of 3840x2400. This is effectively "quad" or "Hi DPI" 1920x1200. Compare this to the same FCPX screen on the LG 34UC97, and then FCPX maximized across 3440x1440 usable pixels.





The increased workflow speaks for itself - and I'm in love...

Need a pic of them boots !

I really like this form of review, hope to read more like this in future. Calibration reports and input lag charts have their use I guess... but a thorough practical approach is much needed too. Well done.

This crazy setup is surprisingly appealing.

Is this the same as the Dell U3415w ?

Similar specs - IPS, curved, 34", 3440x1440. Not sure about the panel manufacturer, though I'm thinking there is only one for the curved. The Dell does have PIP, and possibly some different ports.

So when can we expect the triple screen review of this

I wish. The 34" flanked by two 25" 2560x1440 panels was 6 feet across. Linus from Linus Tech Tips did a triple 34". He said it was 8 feet across, and particularly unwieldy.