Alienware AW3423DW 34.18" Quantom Dot-OLED Curved Gaming Monitor, 3440 x 1440 pixels at 175Hz, 1800R curvature, 0.1ms greyscale, 1M:1 contrast ratio, 1.07B color - Moonlight
I was hesitant to buy this monitor because I generally don't want anything Alienware-related since Dell bought it years ago on principle, and I generally hate anything Dell-related. However, I need an OLED screen because I have Visual Snow medical abnormalities including photophobia/extreme sensitivity to white light. I bought a smart LED TV a while ago and used it as a monitor but it was a traditional LED backlight that didn't work in my situation and made things blurry which hurt my eyes and made me feel like I needed new glasses because I keep my apartment as dark as possible due to vision issues. Turns out I don't need new glasses, even though the size of this TV causes a lot of eye strain even when I'm wearing blue glasses. Sooo looking for OLED screens on Amazon, you've come to the right place. I'm trying to find a 27" OLED because space is limited, but, well, I can't, it's as close as I can get to that spec because other "displays" I've seen are twice the size as OLED for the price, it's quite big on top of that ... there's some nonsense out there about screen size but I've done enough vignetting I just want to say no I'm not looking at a 57 inch computer screen or anything crazy.
Then there's the cost, I've found most small screens that claim to be OLED are around $3,000... yes I could afford one of those but I wouldn't want more for the screen spend than the platform I'm going to be using. There's a chance this screen appears as an Amazon sponsored ad and is listed separately unlike all the other screens I've seen mentioning OLED, but then in the product description it's whispered that what they call OLED, a quantum dot on an LCD is. ... unlike them, this screen is closest to my specs.
I know there seems to be a speculative issue with this screen, I bought it for $1.2k. I didn't expect to pay over a thousand dollars for a screen, but at the same time, this is the best deal I could find on an OLED screen, let alone from a large non-Chinese company. So I bought it and sent FedEx though that's an issue for me, unlike other carriers they don't actually have functional options for delivery instructions... I live in a quad room and it seems listed as an apartment number, it sees FedEx as one address for the entire property, so even if I could have used their delivery manager these delivery instructions would be attached to the entire property... especially for something very expensive I want to make sure it's delivered to my doorstep it's my rental property FedEx has a bad habit of delivering things to the ground floor where the PO is , it is not my property, it is actually a bad delivery.
Fortunately, the package was delivered at my doorstep, much earlier than planned. The next challenge is the weight... For Lady of the Gods, the weight reminds me of old CRT monitors and the packaging is bigger than that too. Of course the larger LED TVs pack a bigger package in comparison, but they're not. Almost as difficult. Not a problem if you live on the ground floor, but in my case the stairs to the T-junction were narrow and it wasn't much fun carrying the thing carefully up the stairs. So be warned it will take a while to get up and down the stairs.
Assembly is very easy and requires no mechanical skills, the most complicated part is screwing the monitor stand legs to the monitor stand.
Well, this situation... I want to take a moment to talk about it... I think "design is very useful" is the best statement I can make. I'm used to manufacturers selling quality products with flimsy additions... Monitors in particular can have a great screen, but when you detach the monitor stand it's just a flimsy piece of plastic that can break or touch the top of the screen to the screen . monitor screen. Not so with this monitor stand. If I had to fight it at home and I had enough time to do it I would remove the stand on the back of the monitor and use it as a boost weapon... I'm not kidding it's very strong I'm sure you can hit the skull, it's really quite heavy.
Some people may think that the weight of the stand is not allowed... I don't understand, I understand why it is important to ensure the weight when rotating the screen or adjusting the height etc. Well, the scale is still on the platform. The screen's weight doesn't cause it to tilt, move, or anything, and is basically designed to let Newton's fundamental physics do all the hard work of stabilizing the screen's pitch and tilt. Withstands. The stand has the functions to control the cables associated with the monitor as B. Molds in the back for securing wires/cables and a space at the bottom of the stand for routing wires to the other side. I appreciate this feature because my bedroom is so tidy that sometimes I feel like I'm living in Doc Ock's closet... You're always welcome to get a monitor stand that at least alleviates this problem.
One of the things that comes to mind with a pregnant woman is weight. If you have a surface you want to put the weight of the screen on check the weight of the device in the specs above and find out most of the weight comes from the stand so use that, see if that causes the problem and if so include the VESA mount, though I'm not sure what that is because I don't use it.
Now the monitor has plenty of ports, DP, 2 HDMI ports, USB charging ports at the base etc. My only complaint about it is that the HDMI port is 2.0, not 2.1. This means that if you're running your device to a monitor via HDMI, you're limited to a refresh rate of 100Hz or lower if you have a device that runs at 144Hz or higher, like me, which you're using can run into one or two problems. All I can say is that the device comes with the G-Sync Ultimate module and the device to connect it this way. I need HDR, so I'll stick with HDMI for simplicity's sake.
The monitor itself is plug-and-play, but you'll need to make a few adjustments when you first plug it in and play it. You can bring up the screen/OSD menu with the joystick at the bottom of the screen, don't worry you will find it, it's an RGB component. I can't explain it simply, but it's kinda weird that it works in HDR mode, for example, windows has to handle it, but windows says monitor doesn't support HDR... of course it works... OSD Im menu gives you the option to choose HDR 1000 or HDR 400 True Black...But that doesn't activate HDR... In my case I think the problem is that I'm plugging it into my laptop so I can open the lid of the laptop. To close make sure it does not read like a normal screen.
However, the menus take a little getting used to, it's not bad, everything is set up very intuitively, but to get to the full menus instead of the pre-installed shortcuts (which you can change in the normal settings), you have to move the joystick towards you (or higher). The options are very competent, with a wide variety of modes to choose from when it comes to color settings. Note that at least with current firmware you can't select the Creators Mode option when rendering in HDR, this is only available in SDR, not sure why.
Other than that, the setup is pretty standard, and some nice additions are the addition of an FPS counter, an on-screen timer... For me, it's a new idea for a screen, functional and IDK. All I know is that I won't touch her.
One "feature" that I'd recommend turning off ASAP is Eco mode. It is currently entangled and can cause a lot of trouble.
Now I think the elephant in the room is, "How about cremation?" Manipulating this should reduce burn-in in OLEDs but this is unknown as it is a completely new combination of technologies. However, there are built-in remedies that will reduce the risk of burn-in even further, namely pixel and panel updates...
Pixel Refresh prompts you to keep it running every 4 hours, you can't use the screen during the running time, please remember, then use the joystick to click OK, refresh one pixel, maintenance takes about 7 minutes, after that, you may have to manually restart the screen , which isn't great, but it's also not ideal if you're into marathon gaming.
Refreshing the board is an old solution that was also included. Only do this when you go to sleep or when you're an hour away from your computer, otherwise your screen will be unusable for an hour. No need to update all four maps. Enable the hourly map refresh, it's more like an "accidental playback" similar to the demagnetization feature of a CRT. I've tried to run Pixel Refresh for more than 4 hours due to usage but since I use my computer most of the day and night for all sorts of things including gaming, I wouldn't pretend I'm very good at keeping up.
Now for one more thing that others might want to know, but I'm really not GAF, which... RGB lighting... yeah yeah, there's an option to set the color of each component, etc, yeah, it supports Alien sync, I don't think it does halo sync but I don't know because IDGAF is about RGB, whether it's advertised as RGB or not, all it gives is one static LED, one color... I have issues with fully configurable variable Christmas lights that don't add any Performance or gameplay...especially annoying when playing with maryJ...those areas are a dead end. It connects to the back area of the screen and two areas of this ring as well as the Alienware logo on the left side (when facing the back of the screen), the power button, and the joystick. The only two options that work for me are the power button and the OSD joystick because it helps me find it in the dark.
No... what about the photo? great. OLED technology is great for deep color fidelity, and quantum dots have the potential to extend color profiles in ways that OLEDs have not traditionally been able to do. All I can say is that while the white text still hurts my eyes, it's not nearly as bad, and when a game or window has a black area, my eyes thank me because it's really dark and not embarrassing. The backlight is "black". I haven't run a color efficiency test or anything, Linus Tech's advice and some other reviewers do, and according to them the 1k nits claim is true, but it hasn't had 1k nits as long as other A monitors or something like that, IDK. ...the more lice I have, the more it irritates my eyes and the more irritated I get, so I'm sticking to the goal of buying the monitor and playing with True Black.
Can I recommend this monitor? If you're one of the few who use and can afford Visual Snow, yes, you don't have to deal with "everything I see looks grainy/static" on a daily basis, but it will help your eyes become more comfortable with it being sensitive to light. If not, do I recommend this monitor? Yes, as expensive as it looks, there is no other monitor in its price range that does the same. So, I'm not a fan of Alienware in general, but I will say that while their thermal controls for pre-built PCs and their selection of pre-built PC components seem lame to me, I'm a huge fan of their screens.
Also, panel manufacturer Samsung seems to have some sort of swap deal where they swap this screen for another one after 3 years in case of a burglary... IDK if it actually happened or not. Last thought there are also other ports I didn't mention including the actual headphone jack at the base but I don't know if it connects the mic part to the headphone because I probably haven't tested it I use the Skullcandy Crusher EVO headphones with incredible bluetooth so I rarely I use the headphone jack. Oh, and IDK why they think it's necessary, but there seems to be a cooling fan where it mounts on the back of the screen, it's internal, I can't see it, only the exhaust fan, but I don't know why they feel like they need a fan... I can't To tell you if it's noisy because I haven't been exposed to noise and if it is I don't notice it because I'm wearing headphones. So if you want to know more about this aspect, you can find it here.