The Curved Display: A Game Changer in Monitors?

As I sat down to review the LG 34UC97 curved monitor, I couldn't help but notice the bars that seemed to stretch out to fill it. At first, I thought it was just a quirk of the display, but as I delved deeper into my testing, I realized that this was actually an intentional design choice made by the engine. It's interesting to see how the engine is putting black bars there when something's being rendered there anyway, and it's a little bit annoying, but also adds a cinematic effect where you used to get black bars on the top and bottom.

Now, I know what you're thinking - why would anyone want a curved display? Well, let me tell you, this thing is a game changer. The 21x9 aspect ratio might have started as a gimmick, but it's definitely become a popular choice among gamers and productivity enthusiasts alike. And that's not just because of the wider screen real estate - although that's certainly a bonus. It's also because of the way the curved panel handles viewing angles. With this monitor, you get very nice viewing angles, which means that no matter where you sit in front of it, the image remains fairly uniform.

I find myself becoming more and more of a fan of the 21x9 format as I continue to use this monitor. It's definitely not just for show - the wider screen does offer some advantages over traditional monitors. And one of the most annoying things about dealing with multiple monitor setups is, of course, the bezels. But with a panel like this, you can deal with a wider viewing angle and more screen real estate without having to worry about those pesky bezels.

Now, I know that some of you might be thinking - what about infinity or surround? Well, let me tell you, these technologies are nice and all, but they're also pretty finicky. And when it comes down to it, the 21x9 format is a much more practical choice for most people. Sure, it's not as flashy as having a whole wall of screens stretching out in front of you, but it's definitely more functional.

Of course, one of the main advantages of this monitor is its color accuracy and pixel density. The LG 34UC97 delivers on both fronts, with excellent colors and a very high pixel density. And let me tell you, the uniformity of the image is top-notch - even in light bleed, there's not too much to complain about. The only real issue I have is that there isn't much height adjustment, which might be a bit of a drawback for some users.

But overall, I'd say this monitor is worth its weight in gold. It's got excellent color accuracy, top-notch pixel density, and a very nice viewing angle. And while it might not be the most flashy thing on the market, it's definitely a solid choice for anyone looking for a high-quality curved display. Whether you're a gamer or just someone who likes to stay productive, this monitor is definitely worth checking out.

So, what do you guys think about curved displays? Do you like them, or are they just a gimmick? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter at @js2cents. And if you've got any thoughts on this monitor or monitors in general, be sure to head over to the forums at js2sense.com and join the discussion. As always, thanks for watching - we'll see you guys in the next video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on jay's two cents here and we're back with another tech video just like i promised in the last bike video thing that we just did and the jay always pays his debts sorry i i've been watching a lot of game of thrones lately it's really getting addictive i just started watching it may god have mercy on my soul because i think it belongs to hbo now the new evga silence series power supplies offer excellent silence and efficiency through their new evga eco mode technology and also features a seven year warranty for worry-free gaming click the link in the description to learn more so a few weeks back i was lucky enough to take a look at lg's new 34 um 67 vsync freesync kitchen sink whatever sync monitor and i was a little bit underwhelmed i mean freesync is kind of cool and all but personally just my personal opinion i don't really care about all the new vsync g-sync freesync technology going into everything i personally just don't really care all that much personally for me not all that pleasing to look at especially since i look at a 1440p panel as my main panel every single day so going back to something with you know 1080p pixel density was just not pleasing on the eyes so when lg saw that video they reached out to me and said hey how would you like take a look at our u c 97 21 by 9 ultra wide curved panel and i was like well heck yeah sign me up because if you're not aware this panel behind me is a 3440 by 1440p so basically it's 1440p pixel density and a 34 inch ultra wide curved panel now i saw this thing at ces i didn't spend a whole lot of attention to it because really i didn't think it's something i would be taking a look at so soon but of course when lg reached out to me i owed it to of course the audience and myself to get up close personal and a little bit intimate with this monitor now it is an ips panel so as a content creator that's something that game that really interested me because none of the panels that i have in this office are ips so i'm always kind of guessing as to the color correction and quite often i guess incorrectly so either i look yellow or green or orange or blue or purple or something because i just don't have anything that's color accurate and this thing has an srgb rating of over 99 so that means that the color accuracy on this thing especially when calibrated is going to be damn near lifelike now the stand on this thing is actually very elegant in fact it is all metal it is nickel plated very shiny very very well built it doesn't slide around the desk because it has rubber feet unfortunately it lacks any sort of height adjustment whatsoever so you are stuck on the height and as you can see it almost didn't fit underneath my little gpu shelf right there so you're gonna have to keep that in mind if you're searching for or interested in buying this monitor there is no height adjustment there is only tilt adjustment and even then it doesn't tilt down really much past the vertical it tilts mostly up so you're definitely going to want to keep that in mind now when it comes to vase amount the first thing i did was i looked on the back of the panel to see if it has vase amount because i like to visa mount all of my panels and i was a little disappointed to see that it did not have visa mount built in however they did actually include somewhere i'll find it give me a second they did actually include this plate right here which simply mounts onto the same little swiveling bracket that's on the back of the panel and then you have four screws here that would mount to a vase amount so this is going to retain all of its up and down adjustment built on to the monitor as well as being able to screw into a vase amount now it's not nearly as elegant as the panel or the back kind of a gold color looks itself but then again most of the time you don't really look at the back of the panel anyway speaking of the back of the panel it is once again all metal so the the monitor itself is very hefty uh it even has a nice plastic cover to cover all of the i o that's on the back of the monitor and speaking of io i was actually kind of surprised to see that there is no dvi support in fact there is displayport two hdmi ports uh two usb 3.0 and two thunderbolt 2 ports on the back so n actually has an audio jack as well the audio built into the monitor is lackluster it's not even really worth mentioning i couldn't even demo it for you and give you an accurate representation of what it sounds like so as with most built-ins monitor speakers they produce sound but probably not the sound you're looking for the cool thing about the hdmi ports on this panel is the fact that you could actually split this panel in two and have two perfectly square one by one panels with each hdmi treating each half of the screen as two separate monitors not entirely sure why you would want to do that but i guess technically can maybe if you want to have two different systems hooked up to it at the same time i don't know but that flexibility is there now the thunderbolt 2 is going to be more appealing towards content creators that are working on a mac platform because most pc enthusiasts or pc content creators are not really utilizing thunderbolt that's really become more of a mac thing but it has thunderbolt on this so you could use it as an auxiliary display for your mac pros or your macbooks or whatever else you're using that's mac apple mac mac apple now when it comes to gaming because that's what most of the people watching my channel are going to care about the 34 uc 97 is a 5 millisecond panel which is not as fast as a lot of gaming panels which advertise as low as uh one millisecond greater gray however uh five milliseconds to me is kind of still very very acceptable in fact anything under 14 milliseconds is typically considered lag-less when it comes to input in fact there is no perceived input lag whatsoever when i move the mouse around it feels very very responsive even though it's a 60 hertz panel and i am used to 144 hertz panels uh it doesn't feel like there's any sort of input lag on there now games i'm happy to say are really starting to utilize this 21x9 format where you're not getting the black bars on the side interestingly enough though uh in games like gta 5 the black bars are there in a lot of the cut scenes even though the game is rendered out and the cut scene is basically being rendered in the game engine and game environment itself you can actually see the parts that are blacked out as the bars kind of stretch out to fill it so i kind of find it interesting that the engine is putting black bars there when something's being rendered there anyway so it's a little bit annoying and i guess it adds a little bit of cinematic effect where you used to get black bars on the top and bottom now we're just getting them on the side but whatever i digress gameplay on the sides of the 21x9 don't feel stretched out and that could help or have a little bit to do with the fact that the subtle curve on the display is giving you very nice viewing angles in fact it's keeping your view between right side and left side of the monitor fairly uniform where the distance from your eyes to that part of the panel is not going to really be affected when we sit close to monitors on our desks you can have quite a bit of distance change between the center of the panel and the edges of the panel because as you turn your head that distance gets farther away so the idea of the curved panel is to eliminate a lot of that distance change when it comes to looking at the screen and since we sit so close to the panel we don't really need that much of a curve otherwise it would start to look a little bit distorted now i find myself becoming more and more of a fan of the 21x9 format when it first came out i kind of wondered if it was going to be more of a gimmick is it something people were going to adopt and you do find a lot more people especially gamers are starting to adopt this because it's a good alternative to ifinity and surround the most annoying thing with dealing with multiple monitor setups is of course the bezels but the panel like this actually allows you to deal with a wider viewing angle a wider screen real estate without having to deal with bezels or even the driver finickiness that is found in nvidia surround and amd's ifinity maybe even in the future we'll find even wider panels where they're getting you know maybe the width of two 16x9 panels you never know i mean when this first came out i thought it was a little bit gimmicky but it really does seem like by 9 is here to stay and a lot of people are adopting it in fact it probably isn't going to be long before we start seeing 4k variants of 21x9 but then of course graphics cards are going to be getting hit really hard in fact this 3440 by 1440 really does push my 980 classified to the limits when it comes to gaming so the pixel density is there and the color accuracy of course is what really makes this panel really worth its weight in gold almost literally considering the rear of the thing looks like gold it's kind of in terms of color it kind of looks a lot like the gold iphone from apple it's really kind of almost a pewter gold color so the panel itself is built very very sturdy i would like to see height adjustment on the thing but the pixel density is fantastic the uniformity of the color and even in light bleed in the corners are really not too bad there's some but not a lot color shift isn't there of course because it's ips and it's combated a little bit by the fact that we have a curved panel and gaming on this thing even though it's a 60hz panel and i'm personally and subjectively uh leaning more towards 144hz panels being my sort of thing could game on this and have absolutely no problems doing so so if you guys are looking for a panel that's got good refresh rate of course excellent excellent colors and is going to give you a long-term solution for productivity gaming color accuracy and just looks fantastic then you really shouldn't look any farther than the lg 34uc 97. i don't think this is where it's going to stop though i think they're going to start finding more and more ways maybe in refresh rates and response times to get better performance and lower response time under five milliseconds and higher than 60 fps when it comes to refresh rate of the monitor itself at least that's what i would like to see so what do you guys think about this what do you guys think about the curved display i know curved phones curved tvs and curved displays have really kind of been a thing lately and i don't know the curved is nice but i don't think that's really a deal breaker for me personally tell me what you guys think down in the comments or better yet head on over to twitter at js2cents or the forums over at js2sense.com and tell me what you guys think as always if these videos are not possible without you guys so i just want to once again extend a huge thank you to watching this channel watching these videos and we'll see you guys in the next onehey what's going on jay's two cents here and we're back with another tech video just like i promised in the last bike video thing that we just did and the jay always pays his debts sorry i i've been watching a lot of game of thrones lately it's really getting addictive i just started watching it may god have mercy on my soul because i think it belongs to hbo now the new evga silence series power supplies offer excellent silence and efficiency through their new evga eco mode technology and also features a seven year warranty for worry-free gaming click the link in the description to learn more so a few weeks back i was lucky enough to take a look at lg's new 34 um 67 vsync freesync kitchen sink whatever sync monitor and i was a little bit underwhelmed i mean freesync is kind of cool and all but personally just my personal opinion i don't really care about all the new vsync g-sync freesync technology going into everything i personally just don't really care all that much personally for me not all that pleasing to look at especially since i look at a 1440p panel as my main panel every single day so going back to something with you know 1080p pixel density was just not pleasing on the eyes so when lg saw that video they reached out to me and said hey how would you like take a look at our u c 97 21 by 9 ultra wide curved panel and i was like well heck yeah sign me up because if you're not aware this panel behind me is a 3440 by 1440p so basically it's 1440p pixel density and a 34 inch ultra wide curved panel now i saw this thing at ces i didn't spend a whole lot of attention to it because really i didn't think it's something i would be taking a look at so soon but of course when lg reached out to me i owed it to of course the audience and myself to get up close personal and a little bit intimate with this monitor now it is an ips panel so as a content creator that's something that game that really interested me because none of the panels that i have in this office are ips so i'm always kind of guessing as to the color correction and quite often i guess incorrectly so either i look yellow or green or orange or blue or purple or something because i just don't have anything that's color accurate and this thing has an srgb rating of over 99 so that means that the color accuracy on this thing especially when calibrated is going to be damn near lifelike now the stand on this thing is actually very elegant in fact it is all metal it is nickel plated very shiny very very well built it doesn't slide around the desk because it has rubber feet unfortunately it lacks any sort of height adjustment whatsoever so you are stuck on the height and as you can see it almost didn't fit underneath my little gpu shelf right there so you're gonna have to keep that in mind if you're searching for or interested in buying this monitor there is no height adjustment there is only tilt adjustment and even then it doesn't tilt down really much past the vertical it tilts mostly up so you're definitely going to want to keep that in mind now when it comes to vase amount the first thing i did was i looked on the back of the panel to see if it has vase amount because i like to visa mount all of my panels and i was a little disappointed to see that it did not have visa mount built in however they did actually include somewhere i'll find it give me a second they did actually include this plate right here which simply mounts onto the same little swiveling bracket that's on the back of the panel and then you have four screws here that would mount to a vase amount so this is going to retain all of its up and down adjustment built on to the monitor as well as being able to screw into a vase amount now it's not nearly as elegant as the panel or the back kind of a gold color looks itself but then again most of the time you don't really look at the back of the panel anyway speaking of the back of the panel it is once again all metal so the the monitor itself is very hefty uh it even has a nice plastic cover to cover all of the i o that's on the back of the monitor and speaking of io i was actually kind of surprised to see that there is no dvi support in fact there is displayport two hdmi ports uh two usb 3.0 and two thunderbolt 2 ports on the back so n actually has an audio jack as well the audio built into the monitor is lackluster it's not even really worth mentioning i couldn't even demo it for you and give you an accurate representation of what it sounds like so as with most built-ins monitor speakers they produce sound but probably not the sound you're looking for the cool thing about the hdmi ports on this panel is the fact that you could actually split this panel in two and have two perfectly square one by one panels with each hdmi treating each half of the screen as two separate monitors not entirely sure why you would want to do that but i guess technically can maybe if you want to have two different systems hooked up to it at the same time i don't know but that flexibility is there now the thunderbolt 2 is going to be more appealing towards content creators that are working on a mac platform because most pc enthusiasts or pc content creators are not really utilizing thunderbolt that's really become more of a mac thing but it has thunderbolt on this so you could use it as an auxiliary display for your mac pros or your macbooks or whatever else you're using that's mac apple mac mac apple now when it comes to gaming because that's what most of the people watching my channel are going to care about the 34 uc 97 is a 5 millisecond panel which is not as fast as a lot of gaming panels which advertise as low as uh one millisecond greater gray however uh five milliseconds to me is kind of still very very acceptable in fact anything under 14 milliseconds is typically considered lag-less when it comes to input in fact there is no perceived input lag whatsoever when i move the mouse around it feels very very responsive even though it's a 60 hertz panel and i am used to 144 hertz panels uh it doesn't feel like there's any sort of input lag on there now games i'm happy to say are really starting to utilize this 21x9 format where you're not getting the black bars on the side interestingly enough though uh in games like gta 5 the black bars are there in a lot of the cut scenes even though the game is rendered out and the cut scene is basically being rendered in the game engine and game environment itself you can actually see the parts that are blacked out as the bars kind of stretch out to fill it so i kind of find it interesting that the engine is putting black bars there when something's being rendered there anyway so it's a little bit annoying and i guess it adds a little bit of cinematic effect where you used to get black bars on the top and bottom now we're just getting them on the side but whatever i digress gameplay on the sides of the 21x9 don't feel stretched out and that could help or have a little bit to do with the fact that the subtle curve on the display is giving you very nice viewing angles in fact it's keeping your view between right side and left side of the monitor fairly uniform where the distance from your eyes to that part of the panel is not going to really be affected when we sit close to monitors on our desks you can have quite a bit of distance change between the center of the panel and the edges of the panel because as you turn your head that distance gets farther away so the idea of the curved panel is to eliminate a lot of that distance change when it comes to looking at the screen and since we sit so close to the panel we don't really need that much of a curve otherwise it would start to look a little bit distorted now i find myself becoming more and more of a fan of the 21x9 format when it first came out i kind of wondered if it was going to be more of a gimmick is it something people were going to adopt and you do find a lot more people especially gamers are starting to adopt this because it's a good alternative to ifinity and surround the most annoying thing with dealing with multiple monitor setups is of course the bezels but the panel like this actually allows you to deal with a wider viewing angle a wider screen real estate without having to deal with bezels or even the driver finickiness that is found in nvidia surround and amd's ifinity maybe even in the future we'll find even wider panels where they're getting you know maybe the width of two 16x9 panels you never know i mean when this first came out i thought it was a little bit gimmicky but it really does seem like by 9 is here to stay and a lot of people are adopting it in fact it probably isn't going to be long before we start seeing 4k variants of 21x9 but then of course graphics cards are going to be getting hit really hard in fact this 3440 by 1440 really does push my 980 classified to the limits when it comes to gaming so the pixel density is there and the color accuracy of course is what really makes this panel really worth its weight in gold almost literally considering the rear of the thing looks like gold it's kind of in terms of color it kind of looks a lot like the gold iphone from apple it's really kind of almost a pewter gold color so the panel itself is built very very sturdy i would like to see height adjustment on the thing but the pixel density is fantastic the uniformity of the color and even in light bleed in the corners are really not too bad there's some but not a lot color shift isn't there of course because it's ips and it's combated a little bit by the fact that we have a curved panel and gaming on this thing even though it's a 60hz panel and i'm personally and subjectively uh leaning more towards 144hz panels being my sort of thing could game on this and have absolutely no problems doing so so if you guys are looking for a panel that's got good refresh rate of course excellent excellent colors and is going to give you a long-term solution for productivity gaming color accuracy and just looks fantastic then you really shouldn't look any farther than the lg 34uc 97. i don't think this is where it's going to stop though i think they're going to start finding more and more ways maybe in refresh rates and response times to get better performance and lower response time under five milliseconds and higher than 60 fps when it comes to refresh rate of the monitor itself at least that's what i would like to see so what do you guys think about this what do you guys think about the curved display i know curved phones curved tvs and curved displays have really kind of been a thing lately and i don't know the curved is nice but i don't think that's really a deal breaker for me personally tell me what you guys think down in the comments or better yet head on over to twitter at js2cents or the forums over at js2sense.com and tell me what you guys think as always if these videos are not possible without you guys so i just want to once again extend a huge thank you to watching this channel watching these videos and we'll see you guys in the next one\n"