LG 34UC79G PC monitor that’s ahead of the curve

A monitor isn’t just a monitor. You can get them with ultra-wide screens, with high refresh rates for smooth gaming, with curved screens to immerse yourself in the action (or a spreadsheet). Or you can get the LG 34UC79G, which is all of the above.

With a resolution of 2560x1080 pixels it’s a screen and a half, or at least a screen and one-third. Compared with a standard 1920x1080-pixel 27in monitor, the 21:9 picture is the same physical height, with the same number of pixels, but it’s 33 per cent wider. Like a dual-monitor setup, it could be used to give you room for a large preview window plus a number of palettes, or simply enough space to spread your work out a bit.

But the 34UC79G is mainly aimed at home entertainment: sit down at it to play a 3D game or watch a film, and the width is enough to envelop you in the picture. The curve is supposed to reinforce that immersive experience, but compared with the similarly sized Samsung CF971 (£745 from Ebuyer www. snipca.com/ 25139), it’s rather subtle. What gamers will really appreciate is the 144Hz refresh rate, which means if your graphics card is up to it (and recent AMD cards with Freesync are ideal) you’ll get super-smooth action with no juddering and almost no ghosting.

We found it helped to select the Fast response-time setting in the on-screen menus, while enabling 1ms Motion Blur Reduction completely eliminated blurring, but nearly halved the brightness. This isn’t the brightest screen to start with, so we couldn’t put up with that.

With almost no bezel at the top or sides, the 34UC79G looks amazing from a distance; close up, it’s plasticky and creaky. Unfortunately, that’s not the only corner that’s been cut. We found it only covered 85 per cent of the SRGB colour range, and within that, accuracy was poor. Contrast is excellent, and there’s no distracting backlight bleed at the edges, so games and films still looked very good, but this isn’t the screen for photo or video editing.

For gamers, it’s cheaper than other ultra-wide curved screens and performs pretty well. For the rest of us, it would make more sense to buy a higherresolution screen like Iiyama’s Prolite XUB3490WQSU (see our review, Issue 481), which isn’t curved but packs in more pixels than two Full HD screens, adding height as well as width.

Get a wider, more immersive picture, but its colours are off