You can pay well over $1,000 for a 34-inch OLED monitor with 3,440 by 1,440 pixels and 250 nits full-screen brightness. Or you can bag the AOPEN 34HC5CUR Pbmiiphx (props to the marketeers for that one!) with exactly the same specs for just $199 from Newegg. I know, silly, isn't it?
I have, of course, been rather selective with those specifications. There are plenty of metrics by which this impecunious gaming panel falls short of any given megabucks OLED monitor. And yet the point holds.
You're getting exactly the same resolution and form factor. On the desktop and for SDR content, you're getting similar levels of visual punch. Put simply, it's great to know that you can get such a large, relatively high-res monitor for so little money, right?
Even better, this is a 144Hz panel and offers claimed 1ms pixel response, so it's no slouch. Should you wish to caveat that, well, the "1ms" is courtesy of TVR or "Turbo Visual Response."
No, I don't know what that is, either. But it's very likely another name for MPRT, which is a technology that reduces response at the cost of brightness. Given this isn't a hugely punchy panel to begin with, that could be problematic.
More to the point, this is a budget priced monitor with a VA-type panel, so pixel response isn't likely to be stellar. The GtG response is probably more like 3ms or 4ms. But that's not terrible. It's just not spectacular.
For the record, this is a curved panel with a moderate 1500R arc, and offers 144Hz over DisplayPort and 100Hz over HDMI. There's no USB-C, but then there was never going to be for this kind of money.
Oh and if you're wondering about the AOPEN brand, well, it's a sub-brand of Acer, so not some random outfit that might evaporate tomorrow. Which is somewhat. reassuring.
Anyway, listen, this 34 incher isn't going to blow your mind. It's not going to break records. It's probably not even particularly good. But it's equally probably pretty good, as it definitely delivers what I think is the current sweetspot in terms of real-world gaming monitor form factors and resolution.
It's just an awful lot of monitor for the money. In an age where even a slightly crumby Nvidia GPU like an RTX 4060 Ti costs nearly $400, it's nice to see something that won't feel like you've taken the poverty option available for such a reasonable price. One thing I am fairly sure of, this thing will feel like more than $199 of gaming monitor sitting on your desk.
