Alienware introduces a 34″ ultrawide monitor with a quantum dot OLED panel with a resolution of 3440×1400 pixels and a refresh rate of 175Hz. The peak brightness is 1000cd/m² and the screen can display real black thanks to the OLED technology.
The AW3423DW monitor that Dell is announcing under the Alienware brand has a curved QD panel with a curvature of 1800R. The panel is presumably from Samsung, although Dell says nothing about it. Samsung is the only manufacturer known to work on QD OLED panels.
According to Alienware, the gray-to-gray response time of the screen is 0.1ms and the refresh rate is 175Hz. The monitor has Nvidia G-Sync Ultimate certification and can display 99.3 percent of the DCI-P3 color space, according to the manufacturer.
The screen is equipped with a joystick for operating the OSD menu and you can choose to display in the sRGB or DCI-P3 color space. Alienware offers a three-year warranty on the monitor, which includes screen burn-in. According to the manufacturer, the panel can withstand this well.
The monitor stands on a tiltable base that is also 110mm adjustable in height. The screen has a DisplayPort 1.4 connection and two HDMI 2.0 ports. When the monitor is connected via HDMI, the maximum refresh rate is 100Hz at the full resolution of 3440×1400 pixels. According to Alienware, the monitor will go on sale in Europe from April 5, but a suggested retail price has not yet been announced.
Why ‘just’ DisplayHDR True Black 400?
The screen receives a VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification. That seems low given the specified peak brightness of 1000cd/m², but that is probably because the maximum brightness does not apply to the entire screen, but to a small part of it. According to VESA standards, a screen must reach 300cd/m² on the entire surface to qualify for the True Black 500 certificate. With True Black 400 that is 250cd/m². From this it can be concluded that the maximum brightness of the AW3423 monitor in full-screen display is somewhere between 250 and 300cd/m².
It is common for OLED screens to achieve a lower peak brightness with full screen display. LG’s 32EP950 OLED monitor with an RGB panel achieves a full-screen display of about 260cd/m² and the latest OLED TVs achieve lower values, around 160cd/m². In practice, this has few disadvantages for the HDR display, because the peak brightness rarely has to be used on the entire screen. Due to the OLED technique in which the pixels are turned off for black display, the contrast is virtually infinite. Incidentally, the specified peak brightness of 1000cd/m² for the AW3423DW monitor is higher than what has been achievable in practice with OLED monitors and TVs.
QD OLED technology
Quantum dot OLED panels differ from the existing OLED panels used in TVs, monitors and mobile devices. The OLED panels in current TVs come from LG Display and use white OLEDs, for which color filters are placed. Small OLED screens such as those in smartphones use RGB OLEDs, where each pixel consists of a red, green and blue subpixel. Such RGB-OLED panels have already been used in monitors, but so far they have been very expensive and mainly aimed at graphic professionals.
With QD OLED panels, blue OLEDs are used, before which a quantum dot filter is placed for color reproduction. That would provide better color reproduction and lower energy consumption compared to the white OLEDs with color filters that LG Display uses. The QD OLED panels also consist of fewer layers, which would make them cheaper.
