Monitors With Everything Are Coming

Buying a gaming monitor has always been a bit like Australian broadband. You could have really nice image quality, 4K and HDR support, a 120hz or 144hz refresh rate, plenty of real estate, but you couldn’t have it all especially if you wanted it to be affordable. And even if you’re prepared to spend a pretty penny, chances are you’ll still have to compromise somewhere.

You couldn’t have it all in a gaming monitor. Well, that used to be the case.

Unsurprisingly for the week of Computex, there’s been a lot of new hardware announced. First cab off the rank is Asus, which lifted the lid on a rather snazzy – if probably new car, or Intel 18-core CPU level expensive – gaming monitor that will literally have the lot.

Called the ROG Swift PG27UQ, it’ll be the company’s largest gaming monitor ever. A 21:9 ultrawide monitor with a native resolution of 3440×1440 over a mammoth curved 35″ screen, the PG27UQ also supports G-Sync and a maximum refresh rate of 200Hz. There’s support for HDR10 and the DCI-P3 colour gamut and a maximum quoted brightness of 1000 nits, which isn’t too shabby at all.

But, of course, it’s not the only monitor offering a ride on the HDR train to crazy Hz town.

Due out in the final quarter of this calendar year, the Acer Predator X35 offers much of the same. Like the ROG Swift PG27UQ, the X35 was developed in conjunction with AU Optronics and, consequently, sports a 200hz refresh rate, G-Sync support, peak brightness of 1000 nits, 3440×1440 native resolution, and support for HDR10 and DCI-P3. Both monitors have quantum dot enhancement films as well, a technology that you’ll see a lot more of in 2018 and 2019.

There’s no international price, local price or specific release date available beyond Q4 2017 right now. But experience tells us that monitors of this standard never come cheap. I’d be surprised if either of them were priced under $1500 at release, considering bog standard 4K monitors will set you back at least several hundred bucks. But it’s at least nice to know that the monitor problem is eventually going away – and hopefully in the next few years, this sort of technology will start to creep into TVs as well.


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