I got not one, but two monitors from LG for review last week. One was a specialised gaming monitor. The other was a lot more fun.
The gaming monitor, the LG 24GM77 (catchy!), made a lot of boasts, and included a lot of âgamingâ features like promises to reduce response time, but Iâll be honest, I didnât notice anything looking any smoother or faster. Aside from some punchier colours, I couldnât see much difference between its performance and my own cheap-ass Asus monitor.
It had a pretty decent build quality though, and could also easily rotate 90-degrees in case you wanted a vertical monitor for a secondary display (or you have a SHMUP fetish).
The other monitor, though, is the one I want to talk about. The 34UC97, aka the Curved UltraWide, it is the most ridiculous display I have ever played a video game on, and thatâs coming from someone whoâs played Halo in a cinema.
It is 34-inches. Thatâs bigger than a lot of peopleâs TV sets. Itâs also curved. And that real estate is stretched over a 21:9 display ratio, which on a TV set â where most content at 16:9 â is all but useless (only certain movies, like blockbuster epics, are filmed in 21:9), but on a monitor is a revelation.
The basic idea is that it allows you to perform functions normally reserved for a dual-display setup on a single screen. So during work hours, I could have Chrome open on the left hand side of the monitor, with Photoshop on the right, which made a lot of my work (especially the behind-the-scenes stuff) a lot easier to manage.
But whatever, thatâs boring, and itâs the kind of stuff people who need two monitors probably already have two monitors for. Where the UltraWide shone was with media and games.
The first thing I did when I set the screen up was go to YouTube and fire up a movie trailer, see how it went. I chose the Force Awakens clip â yes, when it comes to the first look at a Star Wars movie, I am a hypocrite â and enjoyed the fact that it automatically defaulted to a fullscreen 21:9 display, with no cropping. While most 1080p content ended up a little blurry (the screenâs native resolution is 3440Ă1440), higher-res stuff looked incredible. Itâs amazing the difference it makes seeing 21:9 video with no black bars.
https://lastchance.cc/idea-stop-watching-movie-trailers-1662917257%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Iâve never bothered with a dual-monitor setup because the thought of monitor frames interrupting my vision makes my OCD burst into flames. The UltraWide, though, let me play games in 3440Ă1440 with no interruptions whatsoever, and it was glorious.
Far Cry 4 was cinematic (see above). Civilization V was epic in the scale it could display. Iâm not normally a fan of curved displays, because on TV sets â where youâre sat at a distance â I think theyâre a stupid novelty. But here,at my standing desk, the screen was right in front of me, and the curves were wrapping around my peripheral vision.
That extended to my use of the display in more mundane tasks like using Chrome; accessing a tab at the top-left of the screen then responding to a pop-up on the bottom-right quickly became more trouble than the benefits of the screen size were providing.
Because of this, I actually found myself disconnecting the display for most of the day, and using it only for certain activities, like playing a first-person shooter or driving game.
Which at the end of the day leaves me torn on the monitor, which is very expensive (it retails for $1300 in the US). For games, unless you prefer glass displays at this pricier end of the market (this has a regular matte coating) itâs almost unbeatable. Every time I go back and play Far Cry 4 on my regular 16:10 23-inch display, I get a little sad. But given the hassles involved in using it for other tasks (and that price), I canât recommend it to everyone.
If youâre an independently wealthy PC gamer with a penchant for first-person shooters, though, knock yourself out.
LG provided both displays for review purposes. Both have now been returned to LG.
