A Game of Two Halves
by Piers ElliottThere are many things this monitor does well. Very well in fact. The sheer width of the screen gives a lot of real-estate in which to load up various apps at the same time. It also means that for games that support the aspect ratio, the immersion is off the charts. The high refresh rate and response rates mean that in twitch shooters and games where speedy reflexes and fast movements are beneficial, this monitor gives you an edge.For photo editing, the colour reproduction is well calibrated. It's also really nice to see your photos and colour gradients without any trace of banding or visible dithering. It's really nice for watching movies too, as the black levels are both very deep and detailed. Thankfully, the on screen options are easy to use.My favourite use case for this monitor is the split screen. I can have my PC plugged in via DP on the left half, and my laptop plugged in via miniDP on the right half, and run software on both that checks the right/left edge of the split screen for the mouse crossing it. This allows me to use one mouse/keyboard and move between operating systems seamlessly.There are, however, many things it does not do well. Whilst the width is mindblowing, the flip side of this monitor is it's vertical resolution. At just 1080 pixels bottom to top, the physical height means those pixels are stretched quite large. How large? Approx 0.3mm. The pixels are clearly visible. This means when writing/reading text, if you are in any way used to 'retina' quality display, you will find the difference to be distracting. Letters become jagged, the softening patterns that OSX and Windows apply are visible and sometimes make words look lumpy. When reading articles online or doing some coding, it becomes a fairly disappointing experience.Another issue I had with this monitor (and to be fair, this will be rectified by using the included wall mount), is that when on it's highest stand height, the bottom of the monitor is a good 3 inches lower than the top of my 15" laptop. What this means in practice is that if you want to use both your laptop screen and the monitor, you'll have a large chunk of the monitor's screen obscured by said laptop. Also, the placement of the USB3 hub ports are behind the plastic cable cover and not easily 'hot-swappable'. Again, easily rectifiable by running a hub off the hidden monitor ports, but at that point, why not just run a hub off your computer?This is a very good monitor. It's just not perfect: 7/10
