Curved monitors are still a little bit of an oddity, not quite hitting the mainstream as some early adopters may have thought. However, they are still an interesting investment for any game, especially if you can get one that is ultrawide and comes in at a healthy resolution, like the one I’ve found.
For just $240 on Amazon—which is $160 less than its retail price—you get an entry-level 34-inch ultrawide monitor, for a bargain price. This is the cheapest we’ve seen this screen going for outside of Prime Day in October, where it was $237 for Prime members only.
The important spec, and the one which sets it apart from your standard PC display, is that this monitor comes with an ultrawide 21:9 display. Where once that did require a little more effort to get gaming with, most major games support the ultrawide resolutions out of the box now. There are still exceptions, and I’ll never forgive Elden Ring for that, but for the most part you wont have an issue.
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The benefits of a 21:9 screen outweighs any such minor concern, however, enabling the stretched panel to display even more of a game, and give you a much wider impression of the world around. This can be particularly effective in immersing you in a game, and can even be genuinely helpful in genres such as racing and flight sims. It can also give more room for UI if you find a game’s on-screen gubins a little invasive to your experience.
The AMD FreeSync Premium support and a refresh rate of 160 Hz belie its entry-level price point, offering a pretty snappy VA panel, with a curvature of 1800 R. That essentially means that it would form a circle with a 1.8 metre (1800 mm) radius… if you had enough screens. That’s a pretty standard level level of gaming monitor curve; not too wraparound to make general Windows desktop work a pain and not so flat as to by unnoticeable.
The only slight downside of this little LG bargain is that it’s not particularly bright. With a typical luminance of 300 cd/m2 it’s better than some of the 250 cd/m2 panels you might otherwise find at this level, but it’s not hugely bright. And when it’s claiming HDR 10 support you might be forgiven for thinking that you could get some HDR gaming in with this thing. But at that low level of brightness you can pretty much forget about that.
At this price, however, your getting a great price on a proper big brand ultrawide gaming monitor. And if you’re making the step up from a wee 1080p panel the difference you will feel is going to be huge.
