**The Challenges of Working with Ultra Wide Monitors**

I have to admit that I was excited when I first heard about ultra wide monitors, but my experience has been a mixed bag. The lack of support for window management on ultra wide screens is a major frustration for me. When Windows 7 first introduced snap and other window management features, it was a game-changer. However, these features have not been updated to work with ultra wide screens, leaving users like myself with limited options.

I've tried using the snap feature to quickly position windows on my screen, but it's not as seamless as it used to be. I miss being able to easily snap windows to the middle of my screen or create a 16:9 frame for my workflow. My current workflow involves maximizing most of my windows, and having extra screen space would actually take away from productivity. In contrast, I've always been a fan of 16:10 monitors, which offer more vertical space than horizontal space. This has proven to be beneficial for tasks that require more height, such as video editing.

**Specific Issues with Ultra Wide Monitors**

One specific issue I've encountered is the loss of vertical space when using ultra wide screens. The taskbar and title bars can consume a significant amount of vertical real estate, leaving less room for actual content. This has been particularly frustrating since I'm a content creator who relies on screen recording for my work. When I switched to an ultra wide monitor, I had to switch back from 200% DPI scaling to 100% because the aspect ratio was different. This meant that when I was doing screen captures and zooming in on specific areas of the screen, things became blurry.

Additionally, I found that recording at 4:4:4 chroma subsampling on an ultra wide monitor resulted in a loss of sharpness and clarity compared to my old 16:9 monitor. This made it difficult for me to maintain the quality of my screen recordings, which is essential for my work. To compensate, I had to manually resize windows to take up equivalent space on the ultra wide screen. However, this was not only time-consuming but also obtrusive.

**Finding Workarounds**

While I've found that ultra wide monitors are great for gaming and certain workflows, they're not ideal for someone like myself who relies heavily on screen recording and video editing. To get around these limitations, I've been experimenting with various tools and software to manage my workflow. For example, Display Fusion is a tool that allows me to customize my window management settings, but even this has its drawbacks.

I recently came across a YouTube channel by David Zhang, who has created an excellent guide on how to set up an ultra wide monitor for content creation and screen recording. However, I found the setup process to be quite frustrating, and I couldn't find any presets that perfectly suited my needs. As a result, I've reverted back to manually resizing windows to get the exact layout I want.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, while ultra wide monitors have their benefits, they're not without their challenges for someone like myself who relies on screen recording and video editing. The lack of support for window management features is a significant drawback, and the loss of vertical space can be frustrating. That being said, if you're looking for a monitor that offers a great gaming experience with 100Hz adaptive sync, this may be an excellent choice. However, if you're in my particular area with your specific needs, there are some workflow considerations to keep in mind.

**Product Links and Disclaimer**

Product links will be included in the description below. If you enjoyed this review, consider liking it and subscribing for more tech-related content. Please note that I'm not affiliated with any of the products mentioned in this review.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe all remember our first time everyone said it would be great unlike all of the experiences before it and that once you experience it you wouldn't want to go back but I wasn't convinced I I was okay going all of my life without really knowing what it was or at least thought I was okay with that but eventually I finally gave in I at least wanted to know what it was like even if I never experienced it again let's talk about my first experience with ultra-wide what did you think this would be about I'm a postbox your stream professor and this is the Asus PA 34 VC ultra wide production video monitor this is my first ultrawide monitor experience and I kind of get the hype but I'm also not necessarily sticking with it as my main production monitor you might notice this isn't what my normal desk setup looks like it's actually on my gaming side even though specs wise it's perfectly capable of being my main production monitor I was quite confused as the why no one had really reviewed this monitor when I was looking into what my options were to you know request one for me to get to test out and having you know use this for a while and I'm now reviewing it I'm still confused why the heck no one's talking about this so I want to going over some specs real quick this monitor has a IPS panel at 34 40 by 1440 21 by 9 100 Hertz it's a it's a 34 inch ultrawide monitor it weighs a ton and we're going to talk about monitor arm solutions for it in a moment if it does support HDR but the max brightness is only like 300 or 400 nits with HDR enabled so not a true HDR experience as everyone likes to say it still looks great you know not as great maybe as I've been Q e^x 2780 Q I think it was that I reviewed that one has those HDR i profiles but for SDR this actually looks really really good has a DisplayPort 1.2 hook up to HDMI 2.0 be hook ups and then two thunderbolt three connections and unfortunately these cannot be used as USB seat which I originally thought it was because it could have like a little USB hub unfortunately it cannot it's only three but it does deliver sixty watts of power if you want to use a to charge your macbook or whatever so unfortunately that does kind of remove some of the PC compatibility with USB ports we'll talk about that in a minute it has a 1900 R curve which is important for a monitor this wide and then color wise it supports 100% of the sRGB color space has a few other color space options quoted as you know what it supports it has the ability to set and calibrate profiles within the monitor itself instead of using Windows which is seen as a better solution and generally works out better it supports picture by picture modes picture in picture modes I forgot to mention it is ten bit which is great especially again for video production work color work photo editing things like that it is a beautiful monitor image quality wise just viewing angle wise even like reflection wise it doesn't have a whole lot of harsh reflections right now I've got my big key light reflecting off of it it is super soft in diffuse this is a phenomenal monitor it's also sharp like it's a phenomenal monitor for video editing and it's a much better impression than what I got of the previous pro art monitor that I bought and reviewed that or I bought and returned last year during my monitor roulette series this one is a lot better it has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience and it's been a lot of fun getting to use ultra wide in the first place I never experienced it before I never really thought it would be like worthwhile but unfortunately I have run into some workflow specific things that have prevented me from using it as my main monitor so for context my main production monitors are actually dual Dell yupi 27:18 cues which are big 4k HDR 10 some of the best HDR 10 monitors on the market right now even though they released a couple years ago incredibly sharp incredibly high-quality and incredibly accurate and it really made me step up my color production workflow and do a lot better job with this and they have been phenomenal to use but after having made all of the videos talking about how great Dell was for saving the day when my main monitor died as I was trying to upgrade and then I was left without a production monitor and they sent one out and said we got you fam they started asking for it back so at some point I actually have to send it back to them despite all my claims of them giving it to me so I was immediately kind of panicked when I found that out trying to seek out another solution to figure this out I was back in that monitor roulette spiral and so this is the one that I requested I thought I would be able to use it but physically it barely fits in my main space in the first place I use I have my own custom-made desks that are basically bolted to the wall there up against the wall which makes monitor mounting already kind of weird this part is actually fairly deep like this one I think it's close to four feet deep but my main desk side is only about two feet deep and so I don't have a whole lot of depth of work which which means my main monitors are on a big monitor arm and push this far back against the wall as possible and then I have my microphone arm behind the monitor as well and trying to get that mounted up in that position just did not work out I ended up actually trying to install the monitor arm in that position before realizing that it would conflict with literally everything and so it just didn't work out and to use some of the monitor arms thankfully not this one I found this one we're going to talk about it it's from Arctic but some of the monitor arms I've used just to support this much weight they need to stick the monitor up like really far out and it just wasn't working out we're gonna talk about actual screen space workflow issues as well moving it over here we're good to go I hate using on desk montt understands because I feel like it eats up all of my space down here which I've actually kept really clear right here because I've been trying to clean up my setup make it look nicer for videos but I usually have a lot of storage that I keep under here because it's valuable desk space I don't have a lot of it it's valuable so I needed a monitor arm that could support it and most of the monitor arms are built for monitors and then are not quite this heavy and they use the gas spring system which is great for adjusting it I actually had a dual monitor arm here using those gas spring systems but for a monitor of this size and this sheer weight it is incredibly heavy most of those kinds of monitor arms don't work so I reached out and ended up partnering with Arctic to check out their z1 pro monitor arm because it was one of the few that I could find that was built for this size and actually it supports monitors up to 33 pounds which is really really heavy you can go up to 38 inch ultra wide monitors and up to 34 inch sixteen by nine monitors and again up to 33 pounds you can theoretically squeeze a bigger monitor on there if it was under the weight limit that's usually how that works and instead of using the gas you know lift system it has an actual bendy arm that just stays rigid locked in one place and so I have it very high up on the arm because I like to keep you know the top third of my monitor at eye level that is what's most comfortable ergonomic ly for me there's a lot of work flow you know a lot of organ on Accession in and keeping it you know really where you want it and then it has a very sturdy pole this thing is held in place it's not going anywhere unless I specifically want it to which is phenomenal all the other monitor arms I was working with and trying to use I'd come back one day and the monitor which is basically fallen over onto my desk because eventually the support gave out this one has full tilts and pivot controls for where you want the monitor to be angled you can pull it out push it back in and you can raise it up and down on this giant pull and then it has a active high-speed USB hub built into the base which makes up a little bit for the monitor itself not having a USB hub so it makes my life a lot easier for having a literal second set of peripherals I've got a mouse and keyboard a stream deck and things like that hooked up here that I need to connect back to my computer because I have the secondary gaming set up and this has saved me a lot of time set up with the monitor arm was super easy super simple the only thing I ran into was the actual desk lamp you have to screw the clamp base into the flat part where the USB hub goes in it just like the tolerances were a little loose so it wasn't exactly lined up and I had to really crank on it for a while to get it tightened in but the overall setup process was super easy I had to do it twice because I ended up moving which side of the desk it was on not a big deal I'm a big fan so I'll have a link to that monitor arm and then description below it may seem silly to have spent so much time on that one particular piece but again I've went through many different monitor arms thinking I've found the right one and this one is the only one that really does quite what I want and I had a lot of questions about how the heck do you support a monitor that heavy because other people have ran into that trouble so as far as using an ultra white goes what is that experience like well it's great for productivity for gaming there is a lot you can do with it you can sort of get extra windows pulled up there again it's not I'm a dual monitor guy and I like using that workflow I very habitually built for having my monitor separated that way because I've done it for like ten years ultra whites are new to me I have ran into a lot of frustration with there not being a lot of support for window management on ultra wide windows you know snap and things like that was a really revolutionary you know support feature when it was added to Windows 7 but it hasn't been updated for ultra wide so I don't have any easy ways to quickly like snap windows to exactly the middle or do exactly a sixteen by nine frame or to do like triple side monitors or windows and I'm not really doing anything workflow rise where I like I pretty much always maximize my windows unless it's a discord chat and so having that extra screen space for that kind of thing doesn't actually benefit me very much and then I run into issues like the taskbar and the title bars for Windows and browser tabs and stuff like that feels like I'm slowly losing more and more vertical space when that's not what I want I was actually a massive fan of sixteen by ten monitors because in my honest opinion even after having used ultra whites I think for a lot of actual productivity purposes and not just gaming that more vertical space is more of an a bit official than more horizontal space I believe that 3 by 2 and 16 by 10 displays are some of the best per you know productivity displays on the market and ultra wide only caters to a couple specific workflows and like it was really nice for Timeline editing you know in a video editor but for all other workflows not so much thankfully I didn't notice the curve too much so that wasn't a big problem but I mean I did enjoy it especially when editing and resolved going back to my sixteen by nine monitors I really did start to miss it and that was unfortunate but overall yeah and then there's some specific issues related to my specific workflow as a content creator that primarily relies on screen recording in that by being 34 40 by 1440 I was going back from 200% dpi scaling in Windows to 100% on this which meant when I'm doing screen captures and zooming in on a bunch of screen space which I had to do even more because of the aspect ratio things were a lot more blurry even recording at 4:44 chroma subsampling things get a lot more blurry and halo II because it doesn't have that extra sharpness and clarity from the higher DPI scaling and that was a big problem like suddenly I felt like the quality of my screen record for something that no one else really notices but me probably but it is something that is a standard of my work that I wish to maintain you know it is important to me I felt like that quality just kind of suddenly felt out from under me and then combined with the fact that it is a wider aspect ratio like I had to manually try to resize windows to take up an equivalent sixteen by nine space so when I screen capped I could crop in on it because I'm not just gonna make tutorials and ultra-wide because that would eliminate the view ability for much of my audience and you know it would be really obnoxious to watch so there are a lot of specific hiccups that yeah for gaming it's great if I wasn't a content creator doing screen capture stuff I wouldn't use it and you know I wouldn't even hesitate to switch to this full-time but as someone who does rely on those things it's pretty much a no-go now we'll mention in terms of window positioning and management there is you know there there's some tools available that you can use and script up such as display fusion to really you know manage yourself and actually there's a channel by the fellow named David Zhang who does a fantastic job of putting all of that together and shown you his ultra wide workflow in a lot really good stuff there I highly recommend it but so much of the set up was a headache and it was just so much like it was easier for me to just keep working in manually resizing windows then just try to get that all set up the way I like because every time I tried it just I wasn't quite getting the exact results and there weren't really presets for exactly what I wanted so overall this monitor is phenomenal it is super pricey but if you're looking for you know a blend of a gaming 100 Hertz adaptive sync experience in ultra wide with a super you know high quality video production workflow kind of monitor this is it I don't understand why no one else is reviewing this I could barely find any videos on it it is a phenomenal monitor this is the choice to go with but if you're in my particular area with my particular needs there's some workflow considerations to really keep in mind here thank you so much for watching my review product links as always will be in the description below it's a like button if you enjoyed subscribe for more tech education I'm a postbox your stream professor I'll see you next timewe all remember our first time everyone said it would be great unlike all of the experiences before it and that once you experience it you wouldn't want to go back but I wasn't convinced I I was okay going all of my life without really knowing what it was or at least thought I was okay with that but eventually I finally gave in I at least wanted to know what it was like even if I never experienced it again let's talk about my first experience with ultra-wide what did you think this would be about I'm a postbox your stream professor and this is the Asus PA 34 VC ultra wide production video monitor this is my first ultrawide monitor experience and I kind of get the hype but I'm also not necessarily sticking with it as my main production monitor you might notice this isn't what my normal desk setup looks like it's actually on my gaming side even though specs wise it's perfectly capable of being my main production monitor I was quite confused as the why no one had really reviewed this monitor when I was looking into what my options were to you know request one for me to get to test out and having you know use this for a while and I'm now reviewing it I'm still confused why the heck no one's talking about this so I want to going over some specs real quick this monitor has a IPS panel at 34 40 by 1440 21 by 9 100 Hertz it's a it's a 34 inch ultrawide monitor it weighs a ton and we're going to talk about monitor arm solutions for it in a moment if it does support HDR but the max brightness is only like 300 or 400 nits with HDR enabled so not a true HDR experience as everyone likes to say it still looks great you know not as great maybe as I've been Q e^x 2780 Q I think it was that I reviewed that one has those HDR i profiles but for SDR this actually looks really really good has a DisplayPort 1.2 hook up to HDMI 2.0 be hook ups and then two thunderbolt three connections and unfortunately these cannot be used as USB seat which I originally thought it was because it could have like a little USB hub unfortunately it cannot it's only three but it does deliver sixty watts of power if you want to use a to charge your macbook or whatever so unfortunately that does kind of remove some of the PC compatibility with USB ports we'll talk about that in a minute it has a 1900 R curve which is important for a monitor this wide and then color wise it supports 100% of the sRGB color space has a few other color space options quoted as you know what it supports it has the ability to set and calibrate profiles within the monitor itself instead of using Windows which is seen as a better solution and generally works out better it supports picture by picture modes picture in picture modes I forgot to mention it is ten bit which is great especially again for video production work color work photo editing things like that it is a beautiful monitor image quality wise just viewing angle wise even like reflection wise it doesn't have a whole lot of harsh reflections right now I've got my big key light reflecting off of it it is super soft in diffuse this is a phenomenal monitor it's also sharp like it's a phenomenal monitor for video editing and it's a much better impression than what I got of the previous pro art monitor that I bought and reviewed that or I bought and returned last year during my monitor roulette series this one is a lot better it has been a thoroughly enjoyable experience and it's been a lot of fun getting to use ultra wide in the first place I never experienced it before I never really thought it would be like worthwhile but unfortunately I have run into some workflow specific things that have prevented me from using it as my main monitor so for context my main production monitors are actually dual Dell yupi 27:18 cues which are big 4k HDR 10 some of the best HDR 10 monitors on the market right now even though they released a couple years ago incredibly sharp incredibly high-quality and incredibly accurate and it really made me step up my color production workflow and do a lot better job with this and they have been phenomenal to use but after having made all of the videos talking about how great Dell was for saving the day when my main monitor died as I was trying to upgrade and then I was left without a production monitor and they sent one out and said we got you fam they started asking for it back so at some point I actually have to send it back to them despite all my claims of them giving it to me so I was immediately kind of panicked when I found that out trying to seek out another solution to figure this out I was back in that monitor roulette spiral and so this is the one that I requested I thought I would be able to use it but physically it barely fits in my main space in the first place I use I have my own custom-made desks that are basically bolted to the wall there up against the wall which makes monitor mounting already kind of weird this part is actually fairly deep like this one I think it's close to four feet deep but my main desk side is only about two feet deep and so I don't have a whole lot of depth of work which which means my main monitors are on a big monitor arm and push this far back against the wall as possible and then I have my microphone arm behind the monitor as well and trying to get that mounted up in that position just did not work out I ended up actually trying to install the monitor arm in that position before realizing that it would conflict with literally everything and so it just didn't work out and to use some of the monitor arms thankfully not this one I found this one we're going to talk about it it's from Arctic but some of the monitor arms I've used just to support this much weight they need to stick the monitor up like really far out and it just wasn't working out we're gonna talk about actual screen space workflow issues as well moving it over here we're good to go I hate using on desk montt understands because I feel like it eats up all of my space down here which I've actually kept really clear right here because I've been trying to clean up my setup make it look nicer for videos but I usually have a lot of storage that I keep under here because it's valuable desk space I don't have a lot of it it's valuable so I needed a monitor arm that could support it and most of the monitor arms are built for monitors and then are not quite this heavy and they use the gas spring system which is great for adjusting it I actually had a dual monitor arm here using those gas spring systems but for a monitor of this size and this sheer weight it is incredibly heavy most of those kinds of monitor arms don't work so I reached out and ended up partnering with Arctic to check out their z1 pro monitor arm because it was one of the few that I could find that was built for this size and actually it supports monitors up to 33 pounds which is really really heavy you can go up to 38 inch ultra wide monitors and up to 34 inch sixteen by nine monitors and again up to 33 pounds you can theoretically squeeze a bigger monitor on there if it was under the weight limit that's usually how that works and instead of using the gas you know lift system it has an actual bendy arm that just stays rigid locked in one place and so I have it very high up on the arm because I like to keep you know the top third of my monitor at eye level that is what's most comfortable ergonomic ly for me there's a lot of work flow you know a lot of organ on Accession in and keeping it you know really where you want it and then it has a very sturdy pole this thing is held in place it's not going anywhere unless I specifically want it to which is phenomenal all the other monitor arms I was working with and trying to use I'd come back one day and the monitor which is basically fallen over onto my desk because eventually the support gave out this one has full tilts and pivot controls for where you want the monitor to be angled you can pull it out push it back in and you can raise it up and down on this giant pull and then it has a active high-speed USB hub built into the base which makes up a little bit for the monitor itself not having a USB hub so it makes my life a lot easier for having a literal second set of peripherals I've got a mouse and keyboard a stream deck and things like that hooked up here that I need to connect back to my computer because I have the secondary gaming set up and this has saved me a lot of time set up with the monitor arm was super easy super simple the only thing I ran into was the actual desk lamp you have to screw the clamp base into the flat part where the USB hub goes in it just like the tolerances were a little loose so it wasn't exactly lined up and I had to really crank on it for a while to get it tightened in but the overall setup process was super easy I had to do it twice because I ended up moving which side of the desk it was on not a big deal I'm a big fan so I'll have a link to that monitor arm and then description below it may seem silly to have spent so much time on that one particular piece but again I've went through many different monitor arms thinking I've found the right one and this one is the only one that really does quite what I want and I had a lot of questions about how the heck do you support a monitor that heavy because other people have ran into that trouble so as far as using an ultra white goes what is that experience like well it's great for productivity for gaming there is a lot you can do with it you can sort of get extra windows pulled up there again it's not I'm a dual monitor guy and I like using that workflow I very habitually built for having my monitor separated that way because I've done it for like ten years ultra whites are new to me I have ran into a lot of frustration with there not being a lot of support for window management on ultra wide windows you know snap and things like that was a really revolutionary you know support feature when it was added to Windows 7 but it hasn't been updated for ultra wide so I don't have any easy ways to quickly like snap windows to exactly the middle or do exactly a sixteen by nine frame or to do like triple side monitors or windows and I'm not really doing anything workflow rise where I like I pretty much always maximize my windows unless it's a discord chat and so having that extra screen space for that kind of thing doesn't actually benefit me very much and then I run into issues like the taskbar and the title bars for Windows and browser tabs and stuff like that feels like I'm slowly losing more and more vertical space when that's not what I want I was actually a massive fan of sixteen by ten monitors because in my honest opinion even after having used ultra whites I think for a lot of actual productivity purposes and not just gaming that more vertical space is more of an a bit official than more horizontal space I believe that 3 by 2 and 16 by 10 displays are some of the best per you know productivity displays on the market and ultra wide only caters to a couple specific workflows and like it was really nice for Timeline editing you know in a video editor but for all other workflows not so much thankfully I didn't notice the curve too much so that wasn't a big problem but I mean I did enjoy it especially when editing and resolved going back to my sixteen by nine monitors I really did start to miss it and that was unfortunate but overall yeah and then there's some specific issues related to my specific workflow as a content creator that primarily relies on screen recording in that by being 34 40 by 1440 I was going back from 200% dpi scaling in Windows to 100% on this which meant when I'm doing screen captures and zooming in on a bunch of screen space which I had to do even more because of the aspect ratio things were a lot more blurry even recording at 4:44 chroma subsampling things get a lot more blurry and halo II because it doesn't have that extra sharpness and clarity from the higher DPI scaling and that was a big problem like suddenly I felt like the quality of my screen record for something that no one else really notices but me probably but it is something that is a standard of my work that I wish to maintain you know it is important to me I felt like that quality just kind of suddenly felt out from under me and then combined with the fact that it is a wider aspect ratio like I had to manually try to resize windows to take up an equivalent sixteen by nine space so when I screen capped I could crop in on it because I'm not just gonna make tutorials and ultra-wide because that would eliminate the view ability for much of my audience and you know it would be really obnoxious to watch so there are a lot of specific hiccups that yeah for gaming it's great if I wasn't a content creator doing screen capture stuff I wouldn't use it and you know I wouldn't even hesitate to switch to this full-time but as someone who does rely on those things it's pretty much a no-go now we'll mention in terms of window positioning and management there is you know there there's some tools available that you can use and script up such as display fusion to really you know manage yourself and actually there's a channel by the fellow named David Zhang who does a fantastic job of putting all of that together and shown you his ultra wide workflow in a lot really good stuff there I highly recommend it but so much of the set up was a headache and it was just so much like it was easier for me to just keep working in manually resizing windows then just try to get that all set up the way I like because every time I tried it just I wasn't quite getting the exact results and there weren't really presets for exactly what I wanted so overall this monitor is phenomenal it is super pricey but if you're looking for you know a blend of a gaming 100 Hertz adaptive sync experience in ultra wide with a super you know high quality video production workflow kind of monitor this is it I don't understand why no one else is reviewing this I could barely find any videos on it it is a phenomenal monitor this is the choice to go with but if you're in my particular area with my particular needs there's some workflow considerations to really keep in mind here thank you so much for watching my review product links as always will be in the description below it's a like button if you enjoyed subscribe for more tech education I'm a postbox your stream professor I'll see you next time\n"